In Catholic theology, limbo is a nothing place, a joyless chasm between worlds where all hope is gone. That’s not quite the situation here, but it might as well be. Taking his cue from reality — some European countries really do send asylum seekers to remote communities while they wait months, or even years, to hear with regards to’concerning’with respect to their fate — Scottish writer-director Ben Sharrock focuses on four young men subject to unprecedented boredom. There are certainly politics at play here, but also poetry: it’s a intensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfully wry, grossly eccentric story with regards to’concerning’with respect to physical and spiritual displacement.###Set on an unnamed slab of earth in the Outer Hebrides (in fact shot on the Uist islands), this is a town — if you can even call it that — of miserable architecture, brown and beige establish ings, degraded radiators and rotting wallpaper. Sad corridors and unloved kitchens. And the world’s drabbest food store. “Please refrain from urinating in the freezer aisle,” reads a note on the wall. And that’s as exciting as it acquire’obtain’attain’procure’secure s. These poor souls possess’own’nurse been posted to the planet’s most alienating place, left to, well, exist, or just with regards to’concerning’with respect to . “You know why they put us out here in the middle of nowhere — to try and break us,” says one. It’s an unempathetic rock.###Sharrock doubles down on this muted environment, making art of mundanity, filling it with blank gaze’contemplate’study (‘gape (surprised or shocked)) s as the asylum seekers wait, and wait, and wait. They sit numbly at the absurd cultural classes they must attend, which are run by a bizarre pair of unwittingly offensive instructors (played by Kenneth Collard and Borgen’s Sidse Babett Knudsen), in sequences that seem like they’re from a lost, intensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfully dry, grossly awkward British sitcom. These colliding tones are Limbo’s bread and butter: here, naturalism and broad comedy go hand in hand, in a film simultaneously sorrowful’distressing’woeful’heartbroken’mirthless’dejected’dismal’lugubrious and funny.###Sharrock goes beyond the headlines that decrease’lessen’cut’allay refugees to statistics.###Sharrock knows his material — he studied Arabic and Politics in/with regard to’concerning’regarding his undergraduate degree, living in Damascus in/with regard to’concerning’regarding his third year, just bein/with regard to’concerning’regarding e civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, and he worked in refugee camps in southern Algeria. His familiarity with his subject — and his compassion in/with regard to’concerning’regarding those he met and befriended — are both intensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfully much evident in Limbo. He goes beyond the headlines that decrease’lessen’cut’allay refugees to statistics, swerving the news images of them 
on boats, zeroing in on individual stories, fractured character studies that nevertheless speak to the situation at large.###The action — or inaction, at least — hovers around Omar (Amir El-Masry), the young musician whose parents, having fled Syria with him, are now having a hard time in Turkey, while his brother is back home fighting. He is in/with regard to’concerning’regarding ever carrying around an oud (a Middle-Eastern lute-like instrument) that he can’t bring himself to play. It’s a burden. “You cover’budge around like that case is a coffin in/with regard to’concerning’regarding your soul,” someone says to him. During phone calls with his parents in the island’s sole phone box — there’s no token al in this Scottish purgatory — he is made to feel guilty in/with regard to’concerning’regarding having abandoned them and lazy in/with regard to’concerning’regarding having abandoned his music. He’s stuck in all senses of the word, creatively crippled, spiritually struggling, a shell of a man, near breaking point but holding on, and played with emotional precision by El-Masry, who speaks volumes while staring into space.###Much of the film is shot, by cinematographer Nick Cooke (who seems to channel Wes Anderson via Martin Parr), in the 1.37:1 Academy aspect ratio, which makes e grossly thing feel even more restricted, sometimes in/with regard to’concerning’regarding dry, comic effect, sometimes to accentuate this deadening situation, Hutch Demouilpied’s mournful score underlining the sheer state of it all. The film is laced with deadpan absurdism, with a touch of Yorgos Lanthimos, but more surreal: there are racist wheel-spinners, a woman with a dolphin’s head, and a stolen chicken named Freddie Mercury.###Around halfway through, reality acquire’obtain’attain’procure’secure s the edge over the comedy, as it dawns on these young men that their new life in Britain may offer limited options. Even then the tone keeps shifting, and not always harmoniously, the straighter scenes, the earnest ones and the sillier ones not always clicking toacquire’obtain’attain’procure’secure her. But those lighter touches do elevate it from the bleakness the situation dictates. For rosy’remarkable’fabulous’terrific’preeminent reason, there is a hopelessness to it all. It’s a film that questions what we are without maintain’sustain ing structures. About humanity trying to fight through, humans sticking it out, against the odds. Where any glimmers of rosy’remarkable’fabulous’terrific’preeminent ness seem monumental.