The Borderlands - Not bad, but nothing that new

Two words sum up ‘The Borderlands.’ And those words are ‘found’ and ‘footage.’ If you’re into your modern horror films then you will already have stumbled upon this genre. It’s the type where everything is filmed from the ‘first person’ perspective and involves lots of shaky handheld camerawork.

‘The Borderlands’ is an example of this, albeit, instead of an American ‘Blair Witch’ style film, we have a British version, where two priests and a cameraman ‘investigate’ a possible miracle in an isolated church in the British countryside.

The first half of the film is basically ‘scene-setting.’ We watch the central characters bicker and rip on each other as we get to know them. Fair play to the writer here, as the dialogue is pretty snappy and humorous which makes it an easy watch. However, the character of the cameraman just comes across a little over-the-top sometimes. He’s like a Ben Elton clone who’s drunk too much Red Bull. His performance borders on manic and over the top. If you turned his acting down a couple of notches he’d be much more tolerable.

Then you have the second half of the film, i.e. where the spooky things start to occur. Again, if you’ve seen any ‘found footage’ horror film, you’ll know what to expect. The lights go out, the camera shakes and you get lots of frightened screaming into the lens (no runny noses though, ala Blair Witch). Finally, you’re left with the ‘typical’ found footage ending. I won’t spoil it for you, but if you’ve seen any other found footage film you’ll know how it ends.

So, although the dialogue is nice and there are some creepy scenes in the final third, there’s little here to really get excited about. If The Borderlands was released about fifteen years ago, it would probably steal Blair Witch’s mantle of being the film that ‘reinvented’ the found footage genre. However, as it stands, The Borderlands is just another – albeit okay – found footage film.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back