London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Friday, Oct 31, 2025

Limbo review – heart-rending portrait of refugees stranded in Scotland

Limbo review – heart-rending portrait of refugees stranded in Scotland

Ben Sharrock announces himself as a master of atmospheric film-making with this stirring drama about a Syrian migrant

What a thoroughly wonderful sophomore feature from the British director Ben Sharrock – witty, poignant, marvellously composed and shot, moving and even weirdly gripping. Despite an elegant deadpan style established from the outset, Sharrock soon gets you to invest in the characters and care deeply about what happens to them. Limbo is about refugees and asylum seekers in Britain, and it’s a bracingly internationalist and non-parochial piece of work: film-making with a bold view on the world but also as gentle and intimate as a much-loved sitcom. It reminded me at various moments of Aki Kaurismäki or Elia Suleiman or Bill Forsyth, with a distinct touch of Bruce Robinson’s Withnail And I.

The setting is an impossibly bleak and starkly beautiful Scottish island, fictional and mostly deserted, almost resembling a stage-set for Waiting For Godot (but filmed partly on Uist in the Outer Hebrides). Here a number of refugees from Syria and elsewhere – single men with no families – have been relocated in grimly functional hostels with a bare-minimum subsistence allowance. Forbidden to do any paid work, they must simply wait for the official word on whether they can stay. And as the narrator says at the beginning of Casablanca: they wait … and wait … and wait. The situation is taken broadly from real life.

There is Farhad (Vikash Bhai), who has come to Britain largely because he is a Freddie Mercury superfan, an essentially cheerful or at any rate stoic guy from Afghanistan. There is Abedi (Kwabena Ansah) and Wasef (Ola Orebiyi), brothers from Nigeria who are always quarrelling – once after viewing some Friends DVDs, about the issue of Ross believing himself to be “on a break” from dating Rachel, and then a serious falling out about the viability of Wasef’s dream of playing football for Chelsea.


Most dramatically there is Omar – a hugely gentle and intelligent performance from Amir El-Masry – who has left Syria with his family. But his mum and dad are still in Turkey while Omar took the gamble on moving onward to try for residency in the UK. Meanwhile his brother has gone back to Syria – or never left in the first place – to fight Assad. Omar is stricken with repressed rage, guilt and doubt that he has amputated his Syrian identity to spend his days on this godforsaken island in the middle of nowhere. Omar is (or was) a brilliant musician, a soloist on the oud, a stringed instrument. He can’t play at the moment, supposedly because of a wrist injury, but this is just an excuse: he is creatively and spiritually blocked. El-Masry superbly conveys Omar’s fear that to play the oud under these wretched circumstances would be an act of futility and disloyalty. He carries his oud around in its case, as Farhad says, like a coffin for his soul.

Sharrock superbly suggests the growing atmosphere of fear and anger that hovers like cloud cover: the men believe that they are deliberately kept in this stage of depression and desperation so that they will crack and ask to be sent home. Their contact with the state comes in the form of the drolly dramatised lectures they receive from two officials, Helga (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Boris (Kenneth Collard), who tell them how to apply for menial jobs over the phone and the correct, respectful way to behave with women while dancing with them at a nightclub – a particularly bizarre instruction as these poor lonely men will never get near anything as exciting as that. Their inner lives are largely a closed book, although Farhad does let something slip about his life back home.

The emotional centre of the film is Omar, and El-Masry’s tremendous performance – particularly in the heart-rending conversations he has with his mother over the phone, demanding detailed recipes in a doomed attempt to eat in exactly the way he ate back home. He treasures the design of his oud, the front of which is a stylised representation of their garden in Damascus. The scene in which he points all this out to Farhad is almost unbearably sad. This is superlative film-making from Sharrock.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
US and China Agree One-Year Trade Truce After Trump-Xi Talks
BYD Profit Falls 33 % as Chinese EV Maker Doubles Down on Overseas Markets
US Philanthropists Shift Hundreds of Millions to UK to Evade Regulatory Uncertainty in Trump Era
Israeli Energy Minister Delays $35 Billion Gas Export Agreement with Egypt
King Charles Strips Prince Andrew of Titles and Royal Residence
Trump–Putin Budapest Summit Cancelled After Moscow Memo Raises Conditions for Ukraine Talks
Amazon Shares Soar 11% as Cloud Business Hits Fastest Growth Since 2022
Credit Markets Flooded with More Than $200 Billion of AI-Linked Debt Issuance
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Says China Made 'a Real Mistake' by Threatening Rare-Earth Exports
Report Claims Nearly Two Billion Dollars in Foreign Charity Funds Flowed into U.S. Advocacy Groups
White House Refutes Reports That US Targeting Military Sites in Venezuela
Meta Seeks Dismissal of Strike 3’s $350 Million Copyright Lawsuit
Apple Exceeds Forecasts With $102.5 Billion Q3 Revenue Despite iPhone Miss
Israel's IDF Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi Admits to Act Amounting to Aiding Hamas During Wartime (Treason)
Shawbrook IPO Marks London’s Biggest UK Listing in Two Years
UK Government Split Over Backing Brazil’s $125 Billion Tropical Forest Fund Ahead of COP30
J.K. Rowling Condemns Glamour UK Feature of Nine Trans Women as 'Men Better at Being Women'
King Charles III Removes Prince Andrew’s Titles and Orders His Departure from Royal Lodge
UK Finance Minister Reeves Releases Email Correspondence to Clarify Rental-Licence Breach
UK and Vietnam Sign Landmark Migration Deal to Fast-Track Returns of Irregular Arrivals
UK Drug-Pricing Overhaul Essential for Life-Sciences Ambition, Says GSK Chief
Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie Temporarily Leave the UK Amid Their Parents’ Royal Fallout
UK Weighs Early End to Oil and Gas Windfall Tax as Reeves Seeks Investment Commitments
UK Retail Inflation Slows as Shop Prices Fall for First Time Since Spring
Next Raises Full-Year Profit Guidance After Strong Third-Quarter Performance
Reform UK’s Lee Anderson Admits to 'Gaming' Benefits System While Advocating Crackdown
United States and South Korea Conclude Major Trade Accord Worth $350 Billion
Hurricane Melissa Strikes Cuba After Devastating Jamaica With Record Winds
Vice President Vance to Headline Turning Point USA Campus Event at Ole Miss
U.S. Targets Maritime Narco-Routes While Border Pressure to Mexico Remains Limited
Bill Gates at 70: “I Have a Real Fear of Artificial Intelligence – and Also Regret”
Elon Musk Unveils Grokipedia: An AI-Driven Alternative to Wikipedia
Saudi Arabia Unveils Vision for First-Ever "Sky Stadium" Suspended Over Desert Floor
Amazon Announces 14 000 Corporate Job Cuts as AI Investment Accelerates
UK Shop Prices Fall for First Time Since March, Food Leads the Decline
London Stock Exchange Group ADR (LNSTY) Earns Zacks Rank #1 Upgrade on Rising Earnings Outlook
Soap legend Tony Adams, long-time star of Crossroads, dies at 84
Rachel Reeves Signals Tax Increases Ahead of November Budget Amid £20-50 Billion Fiscal Gap
NatWest Past Gains of 314% Spotlight Opportunity — But Some Key Risks Remain
UK Launches ‘Golden Age’ of Nuclear with £38 Billion Sizewell C Approval
UK Announces £1.08 Billion Budget for Offshore Wind Auction to Boost 2030 Capacity
UK Seeks Steel Alliance with EU and US to Counter China’s Over-Capacity
UK Struggles to Balance China as Both Strategic Threat and Valued Trading Partner
Argentina’s Markets Surge as Milei’s Party Secures Major Win
British Journalist Sami Hamdi Detained by U.S. Authorities After Visa Revocation Amid Israel-Gaza Commentary
King Charles Unveils UK’s First LGBT+ Armed Forces Memorial at National Memorial Arboretum
At ninety-two and re-elected: Paul Biya secures eighth term in Cameroon amid unrest
Racist Incidents Against UK Nurses Surge by 55%
UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves Cites Shared Concerns With Trump Administration as Foundation for Early US-UK Trade Deal
Essentra plc: A Closer Look at a UK ‘Penny Stock’ Opportunity Amid Market Weakness
×