The Borderlands, 2013
Written and Directed by Elliot Goldner
Starring Robin Hill, Gordon Kennedy, Aiden McArdle, Luke Neal and Patrick Godfrey
SYNOPSIS:
Follows a team of Vatican investigators sent to the British West Country to investigate reports of paranormal activity at a remote church.
Found footage movies are nothing new and ones based around religious/paranormal events are even more cliché. But The Borderlands manages to do something that all the others have failed at doing – it’s entertaining, tense and incredibly well put together.
The story focuses on a core team of three people who are investigating a supposed sign from God at a church out in the West Country. Deacon (Gordon Kennedy) and Mark (Aiden McArdle) are our rivalling religious figures while Gray (Robin Hill) is the everyday tech man who is there to make sure all the camera equipment they use to document their findings is in working order. As they delve deeper and deeper into their investigation, the more they uncover about the church’s dark past and its sinister intentions.
The Borderlands succeeds in giving logical reasoning as to why there are cameras on all the time as both the house and the church are rigged Big Brother style and all the team members wear headcams to record first person perspectives. You could argue the case of ‘who has edited this together’, but in a medium that has produced lazily put together farces, it’s commendable that they at least tried and succeeded. The camera set-up creates a very tense atmosphere and are much more preferable to the headcams which produce the annoying shaky shots we’ve become accustom to with this genre.
The film does sadly turn into your average found footage affair as it reaches the movie’s climax and they can only use their headcams, which is disappointing as all the build up to it is great and it never relied on cheap tricks to unease its audience. Director Elliot Goldner chooses his angles wisely and he only resorts to the genres tropes every now and again to produce a couple of scares. You could never say that The Borderlands is scary, but it can at times be very unnerving and you’re never quite sure where the movie is heading.
But what really drives the film is the friendship between Deacon and Gray. At first the two don’t get along, but their relationship develops really sweetly over the movie’s running time and this is down to the great performances by both Kennedy and Hill. Hill in particular is superb as the non-religious tech-savy Londoner who is the most convinced person that there is God-like events happening and he is quite possibly one of the most likeable characters in a horror movie all year. His dry tone and brilliant delivery not only produces some good laughs to break tension, but also help invest you in the pretty mundane story. Both characters are brilliantly fleshed out and have their own arcs, something that is quite refreshing for a genre known for treating its players as nothing more than tripods.
It is far from perfect and there are some flaws in there, but The Borderlands is a really good found footage movie as it puts more emphasis on character than scares, at least for the first two thirds. The final act could have done with a bit more refinement and there were a few unanswered questions, but The Borderlands is easily one of the better found footage movies produced in recent memory and could rival Frankenstein’s Army for the best of the year.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of Flickering Myth’s Podcast Network. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published August 28, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
