How can the same man be killed twice? That, ultimately, is the question at the heart of Fernando Lopes' Edge of the Horizon (though a better translation might be Horizon Line). Spino is a pathologist who works the night shift at the Lisbon morgue; one night a corpse of a young man shot dead is brought in, and to Spino's dismay, he discovers that the corpse looks exactly like he did as a young man. When his mother's wedding ring, which he always carries on his keychain, disappears and winds up on the dead man's keychain, Spino is more than intrigued and decides to play amateur detective. But soon he finds that there may be more sinister forces at work, and his psyche and relationships slowly begin to unravel the deeper he gets. Shot in a grimy palette of smudgy grays and greens and browns, Edge of the Horizon is an extremely claustrophobic film. Like Spino, one feels the world is closing in on them, that they are on the verge of being squeezed out of life completely. This is an existential thriller in the strictly European tradition; full of brooding streets and sombre nights, clues and fragments that do not add up, threads that abruptly fray without warning. But there is a deeper story here, one that is about dealing with loss, and the inability to let go of the past. What kills Spino in the end is not a bullet, but his desire to control things that are very much outside of his control. In the end, we cannot escape ourselves, and where we have come from, but only where we are going.
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