Ben Sharrock
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The heightened oddness may, in theme and setting, recall the widely loved Bill Forsyth comedy “Local Hero” (1983), which made crucial and rewarding use of a phone booth as well.
The repeated use of a lone phone box operating as the sole link home for a cultural fish out of water is a lovely nod to Local Hero .
What in lesser hands could have either become something unrelenting bleak or heavy-handedly didactic, Sharrock has instead fashioned the type of dryly funny, intimately personal character study that recalls the great works of filmmakers like Bill Forsyth ( Local Hero , Housekeeping ) or Hal Ashby ( Being There , Harold and Maude ).
If all of that makes Limbo sound tremendously heavy, the opposite is true: this is perhaps more than anything a comedy, a picture whose dry wit recalls that of another Scottish filmmaker, Bill Forsyth, who, in the 1980s, gave us wonderfully wry comedies like Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero.
He wears his filmmaking influences on his sleeve, with the island setting, isolated phone booth and droll comedy of understatement inevitably calling to mind Bill Forsyth’s 1983 classic “Local Hero.” (He seems to welcome the comparison, even setting a similar scene against the northern lights.)
Lying somewhere between Local Hero and Elia Suleiman, Limbo is an endearing, intelligent and subtly uplifting piece of filmmaking.