BORDERLINE (2025)

Studio:   Magnet Releasing
Director: Jimmy Warden
Writer:   Jimmy Warden
Producer: Brian Duffield, Hadeel Reda, Tom Ackerley, Josey McNamara
Stars:    Samara Weaving, Ray Nicholson, Jimmie Fails, Alba Baptista, Eric Dane, Patrick Cox, Catherine Lough Haggquist

Review Score:

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Summary:

A delusional stalker forces a popular celebrity into a fantasy wedding ceremony that spirals chaotically out of control.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Sometime in the 1990s, celebrity stalker Paul Duerson shows up at the Hollywood mansion of popstar/actress Sofia Minor to propose marriage. Familiar with Paul from previous encounters, yet considering him to be mostly harmless despite his mental instability, Sofia’s longtime bodyguard William Bell tries to calmly turn him away.

Paul threatens to slit his own throat until Bell begrudgingly agrees to pretend to be Sofia for a proposal rehearsal. As Paul details his plans for the marriage ceremony, he unexpectedly stabs Bell in his spleen. Bell falls to the ground. Paul enters Sofia’s mansion to have his run of the place, although he ultimately calls the cops on himself and is institutionalized.

Six months later, Bell returns to work as Sofia’s bodyguard despite concerns from his daughter Abby about his job being too dangerous. When news breaks that Paul escaped from his mental institution, Bell leaves Abby with her aunt Eleanor while he hurries to Sofia’s mansion.

Acting on Paul’s instructions, Paul’s cohort J.H. Calhoun greets Paul with the wedding clothes and empty trunk he requested. Paul introduces fellow asylum escapee Penny as his personal assistant. For the next part of Paul’s plan to marry Sofia, the trio kidnaps Pastor Lutzner and locks him in the trunk.

Sofia returns home with her latest fling, professional basketball player DeVante Rhodes, to the concerning news about Paul’s escape. When Eleanor calls to report a strange man outside her apartment building, Bell leaves Rhodes with Sofia while he rushes to check on his daughter. Meanwhile, Eleanor also calls a police officer whom J.H. later strangles to death with a bicycle chain outside Eleanor’s building.

Waylon, a security guard at the gated entrance to Sofia’s property, is lured away from his post by the sudden appearance of Paul’s trunk in the driveway. The power also goes out. Penny infiltrates the mansion and kills Waylon following a violent fight she sadistically enjoys.

After arguing with Sofia about how she truly views him, Rhodes tries to leave, but finds the gate locked and no one around. At the same time, Paul confronts Sofia inside her house. Sofia tries running away, so Paul knocks her unconscious by bashing her forehead into the locked front door.

Upon arriving at Eleanor’s, Bell gathers his daughter and her aunt. However, when Bell begins to escort Abby and Eleanor back to Sofia’s, J.H. appears in the backseat and takes everyone hostage at gunpoint. During the drive to Sofia’s, J.H. forces Bell out of the vehicle and seemingly shoots him in his head.

With Sofia locked inside her home studio’s audio recording booth, Paul details his plans for their wedding. He then turns over Sofia to Penny while he takes a swim before getting dressed in his tuxedo. J.H. arrives with Eleanor and Abby, the latter of whom Paul intends to be the ceremony’s flower girl. Pastor Lutzner is finally freed from the trunk.

Mistaking him for Paul, Sofia inadvertently knocks Rhodes unconscious with a guitar. Rhodes recovers, but Penny uses a baseball bat to knock him out a second time.

After singing a Celine Dion song together under duress, Sofia and Penny engage in a long and bloody physical fight. Their confrontation concludes once Penny, who was doused in gasoline, becomes trapped in the sound booth. Sofia tosses a flaming piece of paper inside the booth, causing Penny to burn to death.

With his fantasy fracturing, Paul comes to believe Rhodes is Sofia, so he has him don the wedding dress. Paul then has J.H. prepare the captives for transportation to the church where the wedding will take place.

Because J.H. has one bad eye, it turns out his gunshot only grazed Bell’s head and Bell survived. With dawn breaking, Sofia’s assistant Kaylor finds Bell by the side of the road. Bell commandeers Kaylor’s Porsche to rush back to Sofia’s mansion, but he subsequently speeds to the church after learning that’s where everyone went.

At the church, Sofia becomes confused that Paul now sees her as an ordinary wedding guest. Pretending to play along with the plan, Bell arrives to walk Rhodes down the aisle. J.H. and Sofia each interrupt proceedings to try convincing Paul that Rhodes isn’t Sofia, but Paul ignores them both. Worried about making Paul unstable, Rhodes continues playing up the illusion that he is Sofia.

The ceremony concludes with Paul kissing his bride. As he did with Bell, however, Paul unexpectedly stabs Rhodes in his stomach. Bell rushes the altar to punch Paul to the ground. J.H. takes Abby hostage at gunpoint. Rhodes recovers to slit J.H.’s throat from behind.

While Paul continues fantasizing that he completed his ideal wedding with Sofia, he is actually taken away in a police car where what really happened slowly begins dawning on him. Everyone else recovers at the crime scene, with Sofia and Rhodes reconciling while Bell promises his daughter Abby he will get a less dangerous job.

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Review:

Celebrity stalkers fall across a spectrum that ranges from terrifyingly deadly, like the crazed fan who infamously murdered “My Sister Sam” actress Rebecca Schaeffer, to bizarrely fascinating, like the weird woman who gave David Letterman monologue material by repeatedly breaking into his home while claiming to be his wife. The celebrity stalker at the center of “Borderline” falls somewhere in between. That’s a tough place for a humor-heavy thriller to put an inspired-by-true-events person, even a fictionalized one, meaning the movie can cut one of two ways depending on whether or not someone considers turning such a situation into entertainment to be in poor taste.

Samara Weaving has built a big brand for herself in the horror space. Her starring status in “Borderline,” written and directed by Weaving’s husband Jimmy Warden of “Cocaine Bear” (review here) fame, is an attractive hook for fans of her blood-drenched filmography, whose notable entries include “Mayhem” (review here), both of “The Babysitter” movies (reviews here and here), and Radio Silence’s “Ready or Not” (review here).

Weaving earns top billing as popstar/actress Sofia Minor. She also tallies up what looks like the most minutes onscreen out of everyone in the cast, but “Borderline” is really a greater showcase for Ray Nicholson as her stalker, Paul Duerson. Nicholson’s apple clearly doesn’t fall far from the family tree. Whenever he’s in a scene, he sizzles with the same simmer of Jack Torrance meets The Joker energy his father crafted a career on before mellowing into an icon of casual coolness.

Ray Nicholson complements his unmistakable smile with a piercing stare that locks costars in their place, unsure if Paul is charmingly harmless or totally psychotic. Alternately manic as well as cheerfully mirthful, Nicholson fills Paul with homicidal potential and also unexpected affability. He makes Paul fun to home in on because even a suspicious eye can never quite be sure what surprise might slip out of his sleeve next.

Unless the character was written for him, and it doesn’t look like it was, “Borderline” would have no way of knowing how strong of a weapon it has in Nicholson until the casting stage. This is likely why Jimmy Warden probably didn’t realize how heavy this artillery would be while he was still in the scripting stage, which would explain why Paul has a comparatively light load that allows minor players to step into a spotlight that doesn’t shine as brightly on them.

The primary plot concerns Paul’s fantasy that he and Sofia have been in a romantic relationship for years, and he’s finally popping the question so they can have his ideal wedding. Nothing, not Sofia’s bodyguard Bell (Eric Dane) or her new beau Rhodes (Jimmie Fails), will stand in the way of Paul’s asylum escape so he can kidnap a pastor, force Bell’s daughter to be a flower girl, and live happily ever after with the woman of his delusional dreams.

With a logline like that, you’d expect the imaginary bond between Sofia and Paul to power the film’s battery. It doesn’t. Thanks to how many times he’s had to be dealt with in their unseen past, Paul has a deeper relationship with Sofia’s bodyguard instead. Weaving and Nicholson only have a couple of scenes together, amounting to maybe five or so minutes with just the two of them, and that’s too little time for the two stars to occupy the same space.

The movie’s rhythm loses a step whenever Nicholson isn’t eating up the scenery, but his absence grows more noticeable when the focus swings to secondary characters. In particular, a fellow asylum escapee named Penny joins Paul’s journey toward madcap matrimony, and “Borderline” becomes oddly obsessed with pairing her and Sofia for overlong interactions that aren’t nearly as enjoyable as the movie seems to think they are. I don’t care how funny someone might find their Celine Dion duet. Penny and Sofia’s dynamic is unimportant to the narrative and their time together turns into an intermittent distraction from what’s otherwise a steadily maintained hum of buzzy energy.

“Borderline” isn’t a joke-laden movie. It draws amusement from shocking situations made more absurd by the way everyone acts and reacts. Bolstered by a snappy Mondo Brothers score whose bouncing beats remind viewers not to take the setup too seriously, the film’s capacity for comedy comes down to how well one takes the acquired taste of dark humor mixed with dark violence. It’s a flavor some will find foul. Anyone able to disassociate possible real-life parallels, on the other hand, should find “Borderline” to be a zippy hit of kooky criminals committing misguided acts of increasingly chaotic malice in the name of unrequited, and unwanted, love.

Review Score: 65

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