Trolls Become Us: Mothers and Strange Strangers in Ali Abbasi’s Border (Gräns)

Abstract

Winning a clutch of awards, including the Cannes film festival Un Certain Regard prize, Ali Abbasi’s 2018 cult cinematic work Border (Gräns) combines fantasy with the detective genre, to present a contemporary tale of two gender-fluid trolls. Both live at the boundary (the metaphorical “border”) between the human and the nonhuman world. While Border has been richly analysed through the lenses of trans-studies, material feminisms and environmental humanities, I will pursue a psychoanalytic and ecofeminist reading. By engaging Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “trans-corporeality” with Julia Kristeva’s earlier work on the “abject” and the “semiotic,” together with Timothy Morton’s theory of the “strange stranger,” I will explore the film’s maternal figures, both as characters, visual signifiers and metaphors. The film presents figures of the mother and mothering, while simultaneously unravelling them, to decompose them into signifiers which disrupt the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman.