There are an awful lot of films with the title Borderlands, I have discovered (with or without "The" in the title as its an infinitive and therefore optional). Including this film (which is also known as Final Prayer), I counted no less than four on a basic IMDB search, and that's not including short films, the series of video games or the movie based on the video game that's apparently in development. Regardless, this movie called The Borderlands caught my attention not because of the title but because of the cover/poster - it really looks as though someone has tried to make a Lament Configuration puzzle out of a church.
A trio of Vatican investigators (they refer to themselves as the "Congregation", which is short for "Congregation for the Causes of the Saints") have travelled to Devon in England to investigate reports of paranormal activity at a small church in an equally small village. There, they set up in a small rented home, meet several uncommunicative locals and some local hooded youths, and start working with the local parish priest who believes his church is home to a miracle. Opinions are divided among the investigators as to whether the activity is genuine or faked, but as the events continue and begin to mount in severity it becomes clear that something sinister is going on...
the village and church that the events of The Borderlands take place in are apparently only three miles from the town of Newton Abbot in Devon, which is where Nick was from, and I fully expect that he would have said that the behaviour of the locals was entirely accurate (and that the whole business with the church was wholly unsurprising). They're surly, uncommunicative and, in the case of the hoodies, outright cruel - they set fire to a live sheep to "welcome" the investigators to the village - although one of them later gets punched in the face for that in a moment that will make you cheer. The level of unfriendliness of the village in general makes you wonder if isn't something a little bit Wicker Man or American Werewolf in London-esque going on; that there might be a much deeper conspiracy going on that, by the end of the film, seems quite plausible.
On the surface, The Borderlands seems to be taking more than a few pointers from The Big Book of Supernatural Cliches - bells ring ominously and items move on their own when a baby is baptised in the church; an angry rottweiler appears and disappears randomly on the church grounds; and there's a terrible case of Chekov's Ominous Crucifix on one of the church walls. as the film progressed, however, I found myself getting more and more uneasy, because it's not what the film shows you but what it doesn't show you that makes it genuinely scary. In a world of CGI jump-scare ghosts with black eyes, yawning mouths and spindly limbs leaping at the camera to test your bladder control, The Borderlands succeeds by giving us only brief glimpses of ordinary yet somehow deeply sinister things that become even more sinister as you add them all together. During the night scenes, where the characters' head cams (because it's a found-footage movie; sorry, forgot to mention it earlier) catch them spinning around in the near-blackness looking for things, you're not at all sure of it would be better or worse if something did jump out at them going, "Oogga-booga boo!"
The film's climax and revelation was also refreshingly original - I only managed to figure out what was going on about 10-15 seconds before it was actually revealed. It also made a twisted kind of sense when everything was added together - and I'm sure Nick would have sworn would be easily believable happening down around Newton Abbot.
The film's weak spot lies with its characters. They're a little too formulaic to be completely identifiable with, although that's not to say they alienate the audience either. There's the techie new to all of this (although it was a nice touch to have him be the most eager to believe in the supernatural of the trio); the priest investigator with a drinking problem and a troubled past that you just know will come back to haunt him at some point; and the other priest investigator who is so skeptical of the supernatural that it borders on farce. Seriously, I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him while shouting, "You believe in literal transubstantiation of bread to bloody flesh, but a bit of poltergeist activity is impossible for you?" However, they're a good mix and they carry the film well (and it's not a character-driven film anyway). In fact, the only other problem I had was with the name of the parish priest being Father Crillick - a name that sounded incredibly similar to another infamous priest of TV fame...
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