Delusional Comedy Thriller Borderline Is Messy Fun

First things first: Borderline is not the film it is sold as/implied to be by its poster and trailers. The feature film directorial debut of Cocaine Bear scribe Jimmy Warden looks like a “woman fights back against the world” thriller, one framed from a darkly comedic angle as a 1990s pop star heroine is accosted by an obsessed, delusional fan and his followers, and must earn her freedom through that timeworn process of cinematic purgatory: Suffer, fight, rise above. All of the marketing for Borderline zeroes in on the elemental simplicity of that premise: A woman, and her battle for freedom and survival.

In truth, that’s not what the film actually is. Borderline is an oddball genre mishmash, one where it can be difficult at times to read the writer-director’s intention–are we supposed to be laughing, or cinging? But Warden’s film, for some of its scriptural stumbles and wonky choices, is also rather bold in its construction, subverting the expectation of how you would expect this sort of story to be framed, and stylishly infused with both musical gusto and a good number of gags that find their mark. It’s a weirdly ambitious mixed bag, held aloft by several strong supporting performances and a director oddly interested in fleshing out his full ensemble rather than hewing to a tight central story. It all gives the film an almost experimental air one would not expect to see as part of its DNA.

Sofia (Samara Weaving) is the single-name-having pop star in question, implied to be someone of worldwide fame, though we can’t really make a musical comparison given that we oddly never hear any of her original music. Regardless, one would expect this to make her a Smile 2-style protagonist–a film that oddly enough also features rising nepo baby Ray Nicholson–except for the fact that Borderline takes the quite unexpected action of minimizing Sofia’s perspective as a character in favor of focusing on nearly everyone else. Which is to say: Events are rarely presented from Sofia’s point of view, and we learn very little about her character except through the eyes of others. Whether it’s delusional antagonist Paul (Nicholson), his henchmen Penny (Alba Baptista) and J.H. (Patrick Cox), actual boyfriend Rhodes (Jimmie Fails) or Sofia’s bodyguard Bell (Eric Dane) and his daughter Abby (Yasmeen Kelders), our experience of Sofia is almost entirely through these observers. This is all the more surprising given the fact that writer-director Warden is in fact Weaving’s real-life husband–you would expect the nepotism of the situation to result in the guy writing the meatiest, most star-making part possible for his wife. And yet, he’s arguably created a role for her that misses most of its opportunities for Weaving to flex her considerable acting ability–it’s certainly not comparable to the way she’s genuinely at the heart of a film like 2019’s Ready or Not.

It can be difficult to tell if I’m giving too much credit to Warden’s thought process here, but I suspect this minimization of Weaving’s Sofia is indeed meant to be both intentional and thematic. Borderline effectively forces us into mimicking Paul’s gaze and disordered thinking, constructing our own (false) version of Sofia, a person we don’t actually know much of anything about. We can’t form much of an emotional connection with her because she doesn’t really have a genuine emotional anchor in the screenplay, mostly coming across as aloof and understandably angry once the obsessive Paul takes her prisoner. But even then, Paul and Sofia don’t share the screen or spar with each other all that often–a somehow more intimate pairing is instead Paul and Bell the bodyguard, who have the tense opening scene all to themselves as Paul shows up at Sofia’s door one night and the overly tolerant and empathetic Bell begs the disturbed young man to leave rather than calling the police. When the film establishes Bell’s young daughter Abby and her understandable fears for her father’s safety in a dangerous line of work, one that she says implies “your life is less important than hers,” our allegiance can’t help but drift in his direction rather than that of Sofia, the entitled pop star whose front door can somehow be reached by any obsessive fan whenever they please.

The result can sometimes be rather wild tonal clashing, between the side of Borderline that takes more time to establish character and motivation than you would expect, and the side that wants to be a fun, zany, misanthropic thriller with plenty of gleeful violence, detached from real world consequences. Case in point: When Paul escapes from prison to stalk Sophia once again, he does so with a very odd helper, enthusiastic and bubbly psychopath Penny. Beyond the film potentially overestimating just how many young, incredibly beautiful French women there are hanging around in the American prison system, Penny’s portrayal by Warrior Nun’s Alba Baptista both steals the show with her homicidal exuberance and causes wave after wave of cognitive dissonance at the same time. Baptista’s commitment is admirable, and she’s a joy to watch–at one point she’s sadistically tasing a security guard in the throat, and when he projectile vomits on her in response, her face lights up in ecstasy rather than horror, indicating to us just how deranged she really is. But when she kills that guard in over-the-top fashion, the camera then lingers, of all things, on a framed photo of the guard’s daughter, cutting the “fun” out from under us. Why does Warden include that detail? Is he criticizing the audience’s bloodlust, our misanthropic delight at seeing the wild killing play out? How can we react to the death of one father with a smile, and then worry about Bell and his daughter at the same time? It feels like satire–one hopes it’s intentional.