Ali Abbasi's Border/Gräns (Sweden, 2018) tells the story of Tina (Eva Melander), a border agent with a difference. She can literally sniff out those with something to hide; she can smell ‘shame, guilt, rage’, and ‘other things’ as Tina sheepishly puts it when pushed to explain her special powers. She is a recognition device – and yet she remains a mystery, mostly to herself. Tina's face marks her difference: heavy-lidded, low-browed and with mottled skin, her face disorients the viewer, making Tina hard to recognise or reconcile and activating the viewer's urge to detect her identity. Even though the film ultimately identifies her as a troll, for most of the film she is represented as a mysterious human defined by her affinity with animals and by her super-sensory powers. Combined, her ‘animal’ traits and the morphology of her face define her as a kind of stranger and watchdog over the human race. Meanwhile, though she presents and is identified as female, that, too, is thrown into question as the film progresses. As such, Tina occupies the border in more ways than one, as boundaries proliferate and attenuate in the film: between human and non-human, male and female, legal and criminal, moral and immoral. All of these boundaries are located, reoriented or challenged, in one way or another, at the site of the face – which is itself a kind of limit or boundary: between self and other, between interiority and exteriority, between, as Deleuze puts it, ‘individuation’ and ‘social role’. I want to think about the face here in a dual way – both in terms of its function in the film and in terms of the actor's makeup and performance – to explore how this film both does and does not provide access to Tina via her face, and how we might think about the possibilities of the face as mutable object and body part. In this sense, I want to suggest that this film – and the reliance on prosthetic makeup for the main character – can get us ‘beyond the close-up’ (and its role in defining the face as icon, fetish or access point to a spiritual essence) to the face's fleshy materiality, highlighting the tensions between the over-coding of identity in the face and its transformational powers. I suggest that in Border, the face connects the contested sites of gender, genre and animality.