Gleefully bouncing between genres with excellent performances across the board, Borderline is weird, wild fun.
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Regular readers and listeners are probably aware of my affection for our modern scream queen, Samara Weaving. While the Aussie actress has certainly branched out into other genres including period dramas and kids movies, Weaving is best known for her genre work including Ready or Not, The Babysitter movies, and even a Drew Barymore-esque cameo in the latest Scream-installment. Which means, anytime Weaving releases a new movie with a horror or genre bent, I'm all in. Enter Borderline, a comedy/thriller/horror movie about a 90s pop star (Weaving) beset upon by a dangerous and delusion stalker.
The Setup
Taking place in 1990s L.A., the movie centers around a fictional pop star named Sofia Minor and her dangerous stalker Paul. While Sofia is looking to enjoy a fun night with a star basketball player, everything quickly goes to hell when it's revealed that the violent Paul has escaped custody and is dead set on arranging a wedding with Sofia. Now Sofia, her date and her head of security will have to keep Paul and his allies at bay to get out of the night alive.
Borderline is a wild movie, and I mean that as a compliment. The biggest reason? Tone.
Structurally this is a hostage movie with our leading lady and her friends doing their best to keep a literal series of psychopaths at bay by either indulging their delusions or violently fending them off. Except it never feels like one. Because tonally this is a dark comedy.
The situation is deadly serious, but Paul and his allies are acting like this is all normal, a lot of fun, or the best day of his life in Paul's case.
Which is, admittedly pretty dicey territory since you don't want to make light of a violent situation involving a man more or less forcing a relationship upon a woman.
Thankfully, writer/director Jimmy Warden mostly manages to avoid this problem through three clever means. Paul's personality, Paul's allies and Paul's madness.
Let's start with personality. It should go without saying that someone like Paul is dangerous. No one who shows up at a celebrity's house talking about how they're ready to take their relationship to the next level is operating with a full deck and violence always feels like a possibility. But outside of violent payoffs lingering the background, Paul doesn't act violently.
He acts aloof. So excited to see his lady love again. Even if Sofia throws a kitchen's worth of objects at his head, he doesn't flinch. He just says "I understand, I'm sorry I was gone, but I'm here now." It's almost too dumb to find threatening. There's no moments where he gets a murderous glint in his eyes and says "do this or else I'll kill this person," he's just operating as if he's trying to make her happy.
This is also a major credit to Ray Nicholson, who, in spite of being a pretty notable nepo-baby, he's Jack's son, really seems to have the chops when it comes to playing unsettling creeps like this while somehow also delivering a much more amicable and fun performance than the more serious I Love You Forever.
The second aspect are Paul allies. Paul has two major allies in his quest. And both of them are incredibly dangerous...and commit most of the violent acts in the movie. The first is Penny played by Alba Baptista who is...would you look at that, darkly funny comedic relief. While Paul is certainly off, Penny comes across as the truly unpredictable live wire thanks in part to her gleeful approach to violence and her absurdist French accent. On the other end we have JH who looks and acts...like a violent Neo-Nazi. These two also conduct most of the violence in the movie which means they feel the most threatening even though this is Paul's show.
And finally we have Paul's madness. So without spoiling too much, the introductory scene introduces the idea that despite being madly in love with Sofia, Paul gets...confused about who Sofia is. So if you happen to be in the room Sofia was just in...you're Sofia now. Whether you're a man or woman. He sees Sofia.
This is also potentially dicey territory, since you don't want to make "haha that dude's in love with the other dude" the joke, though I think they do a nice job of making Paul's outlook or failure to grasp reality the main butt of the joke.
So now that we've taken care of the core of the premise and making sure the movie works...we can get weird with it.
The nice thing about establishing such a mishmash of conflicting feelings is that you can make some big swings for fun. For instance, if you have a police officer who's been called to look in on someone's family, you can make some standard LA jokes about him having an audition in the morning...and then show him doing his audition song because LA am I right? Jimmy Warden also takes some giant visual swings, seemingly because he thinks it's cool or wants to let his talented cast, including his wife Samara, show off.
It's stuff like this that really makes the whole movie feel like an elevated reality version of the 90s where somehow a character, who is very clearly based on Dennis Rodman in look but his antithesis in personality, is the most grounded character in the film (in a great performance from Jimmie Fails).
It's not for everyone, but I had a blast with it.
The Verdict: A Wild Ride
Gleefully bouncing between genres with excellent performances across the board, Borderline is weird, wild fun. 8/10
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