Review of The Borderlands (2014) by Daniel E — 18 Apr 2014

Last year a film was released named 'In Fear', which managed to make the premise of two people getting lost in a maze of country roads as night draws in surprisingly creepy and gripping, before the final act gave way to a more pedestrian nature and the film lost its footing.

'The Borderlands', yet another handy-cam/found footage feature, manages to work it the other way round. Not to say the first hour or so is pedestrian as such; rather that what we get is admittedly an intriguing setup, but one which seems to retread a lot of familiar ground.

That said, it does so with a good enough script and performances to not seem too tired; the characters are very real and their relationship is not weighed down by forced efforts to be unnecessarily scary.

Indeed, there is an occasional moment of brevity and humour, which offsets nicely against the nature of their tedious job as Vatican sanctioned paranormal investigators. It must also be said that where in other, similar fare, the explanation of the use of home video cameras and the like seems forced and a little intrusive, here it makes perfect sense and you do actually forget that is what you are watching.

Then we hit the last 20 minutes; some previously laid character-based groundwork about belief and non-belief comes back to bite hard in claustrophobic scenes. This final act's power to disturb is akin to the final moments of 'The Blair Witch Project', 'Rosemary's Baby', or perhaps more pertinently 'The Wicker Man', to which the smart screenplay has actually made earlier, humorous, and perhaps not sheer, incidental reference.

In these cases, the terror is made truly tangible within the story itself, and so it is the case with 'The Borderlands'. How unnerved you are is not completely clear until after the film, when the imagery of the idea being brought to its fruition cement in your mind's eye, and as with Edward Woodward's final, defiant yelling, or Mia Farrow's famous last lines, a character's pathetic cries of "You said it wasn't real" become haunting and tough to immediately shake off by saying, "It's only a movie'.

Overall, not one we might call a great horror film, but without doubt, within the film are moments of great horror!