By Keri O’Shea
Everyone’s filming everything these days. And everyone’s footage can be used to form the bedrock of a horror film: that’s the basic take home message of The Borderlands, which features – as its main premise – the idea that even representatives of the Vatican themselves now feel the need to record ‘evidence’ on usually hand-held cameras. The evidence (or otherwise) in question is evidence of bona fide miracles as reported by members of the lay community: as this sort of thing is bread and butter to the Catholic Church, all such claims need to be checked out before they can be verified. Responsible for overseeing, collecting and collating any resultant footage is an organisation known as The Congregation.
The Congregation as we encounter them here consists of just three members: firstly, a camera whizz who isn’t a Catholic himself but definitely believes in “stuff” (Gray); a Scottish priest who fulfils the stereotype of also being a hard boozer (Deacon) and a third priest who wants things done by the book (Mark). They’ve been summoned to a small town somewhere out in the sticks in England by a Father Crellick, who is sure that his small church has bore witness to a miracle. He has footage (of course he fucking does) of a baptism where…a strange rumbling took place at the back of the church, and some other mysterious sounds too. Doesn’t sound on a par with walking on water exactly, but The Congregation set about investigating Crellick’s claims, taking a cottage in the area while they go to work. What they find ancient evil forces beyond their control terrible danger etc.
I tried. I really tried. I had heard very positive things about this film, and to an extent, I expected to like it accordingly. As the film trudged on though, I realised that whatever tricks it might have up its sleeve, it was fairly unlikely, moving swiftly to impossible, to engage me after such a long expanse of the very worst flaws of the found footage genre. Firstly, the tenuousness of the premise. Why all the Paranormal Activity style cameras in the cottage, if they were investigating the church? This footage had been collated by an outside party at some point, hence the chopping and changing between cameras – but who, and, considering the ending of the film, how? And then, if someone had edited it, why hadn’t they cut out the reams of kitchen-sink dialogue with its pregnant pauses and its non-landing jokes? If they hadn’t been arsed to do that, then why add what sounded suspiciously like incidental music over one of the sequences? Or why not clean up some of the murkiest footage? I was beyond exasperated by the mid-way point, didn’t feel I had any sense of or interest in why they were doing what they were doing, and as mildly ingenious as the ending was, it had been done with acres more panache and sweet, sweet brevity by short film The Ten Steps years before. It also chose to tack on a pagan horror theme, in a similar way to another British film with lots of suspiciously ad-lib seeming dialogue, filler, plot gaps you had to fill with a shovel and then an about-face into pagan thematics which was woefully underdeveloped. Yes, I mean Kill List, which I loathed, and so being landed with a found footage movie which had elements in common with bloody Kill List felt like adding insult to injury to me.
In the interests of balance – the film did a few things well. I did like that it understood the creep factor of effective audio, and a lot of the sound effects used were nicely handled (although, again, it reminded me of The Blair Witch Project in this and other elements, perhaps drawing a bit of inspiration from, to my mind, the undisputed modern master of terrifying sound FX, Eduardo Sanchez). It also managed a few unsettling sequences, and what was happening off camera worked best, creating the impression of a big bad world outside the handycam’s viewfinder. The settings were decent too, although falling back on the ‘creepy rural folk’ motif a bit heavily. See, that’s the frustrating thing here: there were the odd flashes of hope, but diluted so much by the film’s less successful elements that the overall impact was at best negligible, at worst as good as absent.
So, thanks to the combination of its emulatory nature (Paranormal Last Exorcist Kill List Project?) and its exasperating filming style, with all of the flaws of said style in there for good measure, I didn’t enjoy The Borderlands at all. If you’re more forgiving than me, then you might be able to see past the above and get something out of the premise. For a far more positive appraisal of this film, you might like to check out Ben’s Abertoir 2013 review. Feedback generally has been more akin to Ben’s than to mine. Me, well, as I say – I tried.
The Borderlands is out now on Region 2 DVD courtesy of Metrodome.