‘Fear’ Review: Stranger in a Strange Land

At the beginning of “Fear,” the dominant feeling is loneliness. In a coastal town in Bulgaria, shot in somber, expressive black and white, a middle-aged woman named Svetla (Svetlana Yancheva) leads a life that seems to shrink before our eyes. The school where she had been teaching shuts down, leaving her unemployed. A widow, she visits her husband’s grave, buys a few eggs on credit at a small grocery and engages in some desultory banter with a group of soldiers.

The soldiers work for the border patrol, and in due course they are alerted to the arrival of a group of migrants from Afghanistan. Dealing with refugees is a matter of dreary routine — displaced people pass through here frequently, hoping to make it to Germany — though a television news reporter tries to sensationalize the situation. She asks the unit commander (the wonderfully gruff Stoyan Bochev) leading questions about terrorists and drug smugglers and tells her viewers that the mood on the border is “tense.” Not really. The Afghans are tired and anxious. The locals seems to be afflicted by a mixture of grumpiness and resignation, torn between xenophobia and compassion.

Svetla experiences her own version of that struggle when she meets Bamba (Michael Flemming), a refugee from Mali. Their first encounter, while she is hunting rabbits in the forest not far from her house, has a surreal, almost cartoonish quality. She brandishes her shotgun like a Balkan Elmer Fudd. Bamba carefully sets down his suitcase and greets her in English, a language she doesn’t speak. Bewildered, she brings him home, putting him up first in a storage shed and then in her home.

It’s their friendship, inching toward romance, that inflames Svetla’s neighbors and activates the fear of the film’s title. The director, Ivaylo Hristov, is adept at slow-burning suspense and comic misdirection. At first the casual racism that peppers discussions about Svetla’s houseguest seems a matter of ignorance — ugly but not fully hateful. Hristov shows how words lead to actions, how jealousy and boredom blend with prejudice into a toxic brew. Someone throws a rock through Svetla’s window. Obscene graffiti appears in front of her house. A cluster of townspeople who might have been written off as bumpkins, drunkards and clowns coalesces into something like a lynch mob.

It’s scary. Not that Svetla is easily frightened. Yancheva gives off a strong Frances McDormand vibe — sarcastic, weary and impatient, her brusque manner shrouding a flinty decency. She’s the charismatic moral center of the film, much as McDormand was in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

“Fear” has a clearer, more detailed sense of place than that misguided movie. The faces feel as lived-in as the landscape of stubbled fields and boxy farmhouses and sprawling buildings that look either unfinished or half demolished. The caustic, fatalistic humor has as strong and distinctive a local flavor as the hot peppers and mushrooms that Svetla prepares for Bamba.

He is the catalyst for the film’s actions and reactions, but at the same time “Fear” doesn’t quite know what to make of him. Flemming has a wry, melancholy manner, and Bamba has a tragic back story, but he also functions more as a symbol than a fully formed character. His role is to awaken Svetla’s latent tenderness, to expose the intolerance of the people around her, and to help Hristov deliver a timely humanist message. But he remains a stranger in a story whose moral is that he shouldn’t be.

Fear
Not rated. In English and Bulgarian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. On virtual cinemas and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.