Review: Border

Border (review)

By Benjamin Allen Dickson

I’ve been excited about this movie for a while because it was written by the guy who wrote Let The Right One In, a movie I absolutely loved when I was a junior in high school, but Border is basically the same movie but not as good?

Structurally this is the same as it anyway, most of this movie is a standard “ugly people have feelings too” kind of movie, but it feels more genuine than your average Hollywood take on this. I just felt like I was watching something that I had already seen.

The third act becomes a thriller, and I wish that was the entire movie because it felt like something new, something I hadn’t seen before. So much of this movie just feels like Let The Right One In, but without vampires. Once the first twist in the film is unraveled, it definitely picks up and has some interesting elements. Honestly the ending kinda sucks though. There’s probably a solid half an hour I really like in here, everything else just felt derivative.
Gotta give props to this movie for how weird it gets, and holy shit some of effects (excluding the CGI moose) looked really great and saying what they are would spoil it.

This movie’s cinematography was really flat, it would constantly blur in and out of focus, which could be used in some interesting way narratively or metaphorically, but instead it seems to have no purpose. Yes the lake scene was visually  cool, but I wasn’t attached to the characters enough to be moved by it.

Overall pretty disappointed with this film even though it has a lot of amazing elements to it, but so much of it feels dry and created already. It’s nowhere near a bad movie, just disappointing if you are a fan of Let The Right One In and wanted the writer to go in a new direction. I’m split on this movie because it’s nowhere near a bad movie, and I did enjoy the effects so much to where I would almost say it makes me like the film overall, but I just think the first act specifically could have been so much better. So many opportunities here that go by the wayside. Man that fridge scene though, something I’m not sure I will ever forget.  

Also - I saw this in a basic ass Regal theater, not an art house cinema or anything, which is really exciting! Hopefully we can get more foreign films in multiplexes from now on. Wishful thinking, I know, but I’m hoping.  Even though I don’t like this movie, please support any foreign independent film you can.

This film gets a ………..5/10.