Limbo
Focus Features | Release Date: April 30, 2021 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
83
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 26 Critic Reviews
Positive:
26
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Screen DailyWendy IdeJan 17, 2023
The poignancy and low-key desperation of the situation in which the men find themselves is balanced by the film’s warmth and gentle humour. In a market crowded with migrant stories, this is something special. Read full review
100
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeJul 30, 2021
This is a wonderful comedy that savours its remote environment while keeping its subjects at the centre of the story. There are always new ways of telling the era’s most unavoidable sad stories. Not to be missed. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesCarlos AguilarApr 30, 2021
An offbeat and life-affirming triumph, “Limbo” is the kind of original work of art that moves the needle on an issue by interrogating the human factor rather than hanging out on the impersonal surface. A movie born of our times but destined to outlive them, it deserves to cross the threshold from festival darling to audience favorite. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleCary DarlingApr 28, 2021
This character study, which was nominated for two BAFTA Awards, including outstanding British film of the year, is Sharrock’s second full-length feature. That he could make a film so warm and wise early in his career bodes well for whatever comes next. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 15, 2020
What a thoroughly wonderful sophomore feature from the British director Ben Sharrock – witty, poignant, marvellously composed and shot, moving and even weirdly gripping. Read full review
95
TheWrapAlonso DuraldeApr 30, 2021
It handles real-life issues from a place of real compassion and understanding without reducing its characters to mere metaphor. Read full review
91
The PlaylistMarshall ShafferApr 30, 2021
Deadpan has never crackled with such life as it does in this miraculous movie, a stunning synergy of story and style to which all films tackling sensitive social situations should aspire. Read full review
90
TimeStephanie ZacharekApr 30, 2021
Limbo, tender and searching, shows what can happen to people when they’re between points A and B, a nowheresville that can change the shape of a life forever. It’s also about the meaning of musicianship, of how songs and sound can define who we are and where we come from. Read full review
90
The New York TimesGlenn KennyApr 29, 2021
Limbo, written and directed by a ferociously talented filmmaker, Ben Sharrock, takes an insinuating, poetic and often wryly funny approach. And it’s both heartbreaking and heartlifting. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleMatthew MonagleApr 29, 2021
Limbo may be a smiling teardown of any society that actively facilitates the deportation of its most vulnerable inhabitants, but there’s a wildness in the film’s eyes – a darkness Sharrock only feels comfortable approaching through artifice and sentimentality – that betrays the political message underneath. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comTomris LafflyApr 30, 2021
But with his sophomore feature Limbo, a humanistic, tenderly deadpan plunge into the psyche of a Syrian refugee, Scottish writer/director Ben Sharrock sidesteps potential hazards like a patronizing tone and cultural insensitivity with deft, delivering something insightful, genuine, and universally relatable. Read full review
88
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanApr 27, 2021
It’s tempting — and not entirely inaccurate — to call this oddly moving little film a comedy-drama, but if so, it’s a dark one at that. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubRoxana HadadiApr 28, 2021
The narrowness of the frame forces us closer to what is caught within it, and the result is often bracing or achingly tender. Read full review
83
The Film StageJared MobarakSep 15, 2020
What begins as a modest and perhaps slight take on the refugee crisis tinged by an acquired yet welcome taste of British comedy, however, slowly reveals its underlying drama via the stark inevitability of its existence. You can only deflect from your plight so long before the stress and anxiety bubbles back to the surface. Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeyAug 6, 2021
The film needs no excess melodrama even at its bleakest, because the visual language Sharrock has constructed is inhospitable enough. It’s his concentration on these faces, in the 4:3 ratio of Nick Cooke’s gravely beautiful cinematography, that gives it all a redemptive glow. Read full review
80
EmpireAlex GodfreyJul 27, 2021
A film as sweet as it is sad, as pertinent as it is absurd, Limbo is an experience where not much seems to happen but where little things mean the world. Read full review
80
CineVueMatthew AndersonJul 27, 2021
Sharrock’s resistance to easy answers or an easy way out is in-keeping with a tale in which the arbitrary flick of a pen, a stamp on a letter, can change someone’s life irrevocably – and yet may never come. Read full review
80
Screen RantMae AbdulbakiMay 2, 2021
Limbo handles its themes with enormous grace, balancing despair with levity and a realism that makes this drama emotionally intense and worthwhile. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsApr 29, 2021
At times, Limbo can feel confining in ways that exceed the confining circumstances of its characters. But the story of Omar deepens and amplifies the film’s second half, maintaining its droll amusements but playing the circumstances for just enough bittersweet honesty to make it stick. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliApr 28, 2021
Despite its share of missteps (the most egregious of which unfortunately occurs late in the proceedings), Limbo is just weird and wonderful enough to earn a recommendation. What starts out as an exercise in absurdist and surreal comedy turns into a serious examination of the artificial boundaries that have been drawn to divide humanity in the name of nationalism. Read full review
75
IndieWireEric KohnSep 24, 2020
Guided by El-Masry’s tender, understated performance and a tone that hovers between playful and sincere, Limbo manages to turn its downbeat scenario into a sweet and touching rumination on the quest to belong in an empty world. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)Helen ShawMay 2, 2021
The first half is handsome but coy, the second is messier but stronger and fiercer too. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterStephen DaltonSep 15, 2020
Limbo is an appealing little gem overall, with a feel-good message about the kindness of strangers that is glib and simplistic but hard to resist. Read full review
70
VarietyGuy LodgeSep 15, 2020
Limbo sincerely and intelligently finds its own way. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Sep 15, 2020
While there’s little disputing Sharrock’s empathy for his dislocated, stranded characters . . . there’s something rather limited about his alteration of dry fish-out-of-water gags and scenes of people staring forlornly into the barren middle distance. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineChuck BowenApr 26, 2021
A comedy about the migrant crisis is more daring than a coming-of-age story, and Limbo, wanting it both ways, dilutes its best instincts with sops to formula. Read full review
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