“Borderline”: Weaving And Nicholson In A Thriller With A Borderline Personality Disorder, For Better And Worse

On the surface, a movie like “Borderline” sounds like the wet dream of fans of light horror movies. It offers an awe-inspiring cast, especially Samara Weaving, considered one of the hottest horror stars today, and Ray Nicholson, the son of a film legend and a legitimate actor in his own right. The plot here looks like a typical B-movie, about an obsessed fan of a pop star who at one point breaks into her house and turns the film into a Home Invasion, another fun subgenre in its own right. The poster for the film brings vibes from the 90s, when the plot takes place, and the director – also the screenwriter – promises a combination of humor.

My expectations for “Borderline” were high, especially regarding the guilty pleasure level, and probably less on the artistic level. In my optimistic expectation, I may have also thought of a film that would be so crazy that it would become iconic.

In practice, the result was enjoyable at times, but unfortunately, it was too full of characters and subplots, not self-contained (the film moves in a multi-polar way between genres), and it left me with a feeling of a miss.

When Samara Steps Into Madonna’s Shoes

In the 1990s, when Madonna was the number one pop star in the world, there were probably many fans; some may be a bit creepy because everyone should have listened to Radiohead during those years. None of them probably reached the level of Robert Dewey Hoskins, who harassed the star for a long time, followed her, and threatened to kill her. After the judges determined that he was a “psychopath of the highest order,” he was hospitalized in a psychiatric institution. However, he escaped and broke into the star’s house again. Dewey Hoskins presented the security guards with a particularly romantic choice: marry Madonna or “slash her throat from ear to ear.” For some reason, this charming guy was caught again, went to prison, and reportedly developed a similar obsession with Halle Berry.

We’re not telling you this because Madonna’s history is relevant to the site, even if her recent live show performances meet the definition of a horror movie. The main reason, you guessed it, is that the plot of “Borderline” is based on the same idea, as you can infer from the ambiguous title of the film (“Borderline” from 1984 is one of the singer’s most important singles), from the fact that this song is included in the soundtrack or from several references to the film’s heroine being a bit reminiscent of Madonna.

Stepping into the pop giant’s big shoes is horror idol Samara Weaving (two “The Babysitter” films, “Azrael,” a small role in “Scream 5,” and especially a fantastic role in “Ready or Not”), who plays a hot, but rather superficial and not particularly deep, pop singer named Sofia Minor. Sofia has a relationship with a black basketball player named Rhodes (Jimmy Fails from “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”), in a way that corresponds to Madonna’s relationship with Dennis Rodman, the basketball player with the colored hair and a million tattoos, somewhere in the 90s.

What Is The Borderline Movie About?

The problem is that Madonna – sorry, Sofia – is being harassed by a guy named Paul Duerson (Ray Nicholson, the son of the legendary Jack Nicholson, whom we recently saw in a small but well-publicized role in “Smile 2”). Just like in that case in Madonna’s history, Paul arrives at the star’s luxurious home in the first scene of the film, runs into her bodyguard (Eric Dane, “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Bad Boys: All or Nothing” and most recently “Dangerous Waters”), pretending as some point he is Sofia, and that he wants to marry him, or rather her, because he believes she is him, or he is her.

The opening scene ends with Paul stabbing the poor security guard. Later, Paul fulfills every man’s wet dream that comes to this kind of house: you know, recording himself on tape, drowning in a bubble bath, plucking out leg hair, dancing in his underwear in the kitchen while brushing his teeth, looking at a running washing machine, reading a book in the bathroom, and so on.

The security guard survives the injury, Paul enters a closed institution, and Sofia tries to get back to life with her hot relationship, which is probably not serious. Sofia has a hobby of solving complex puzzles, even if she sometimes misses the last piece. Maybe it is a metaphor for love or something, or perhaps it simply expresses the fact that the film takes place in the 90s – judging by the fact that Sofia is given a puzzle of the fucking movie “Junior” with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito from 1994 – and this is what hot pop stars did back then to pass their time, without Instagram and TikTok in the picture.

Rhodes feels like a human puzzle at one point, in another metaphor of something about love, but this is Sofia’s last problem. She very quickly finds out that she has to fight for her life against Paul, who manages to escape from the prison and reach her mansion with the help of a big friend he knew from the old days (a big Patrick Cox) and a psycho girl who ran away Along with him (the Portuguese Alba Baptista from Netflix’s “Warrior Nun,” who steals the show here in several scenes).

Here is the trailer of “Borderline”:

When Parallel Editing Becomes Annoying

On the surface, it seems like we’re going to get a cat-and-mouse battle between a star and an obsessive fan, like in “Fatal Attraction,” “Misery” or some pretty mediocre but enjoyable films from recent years, say “Open Windows” with Elijah Wood, which showed that porn stars also have fans.

The problem is that, a bit like the borderline personality disorder that gave the film its name, we don’t exactly understand what we’re seeing before our eyes or what the film wants to be precisely. Surely, there’s the story of Sofia and the obsessive fan. Still, at certain moments, it seems that the film’s hero is actually the security guard, whose family and a few other characters become involved in the story and get a lot (too much?) of screen time. The film introduces a few supporting characters for fun or to complicate the story, like a police officer who dreams of being in a musical, but instead of doing his job, he is busy rehearsing, ending in its cruel death.

The result is a very messy movie on a plot level, whose film-making only gets messier. The first part of the film was quite tedious, in my opinion, partly because of the excessive use (very!) of cross-editing, parallel editing, or whatever you call it: you know, two different scenes that are connected during editing so that they seem to be happening at the same time. The film is loaded with parallel editing, sometimes to the point where you can’t finish two sentences of dialogue without moving on to another scene and back again. It was a bit annoying, in my opinion. Above all, it hurts the film’s ability to build tension and our ability to connect with the story or the characters.

I do not doubt that there was room to remove a significant part of the subplots – well, maybe keep the deranged psychotic sidekick à la Harley Quinn, who is responsible for some of the more successful scenes here, including a musical duet with Samara Weaving that ends wildly – and focus on what we came together for. You know, a cat-and-mouse battle between the star and the fan, which would have given the first two characters their room to maneuver. And it’s a shame because, at times, it feels like the actors are dying for more explosiveness and depth to their characters.

The Cast Of Borderline: When Weaving Met Nicholson

Samara Weaving is one of my favorite horror stars of recent years. Let’s put her perfect looks aside and focus on what she brings to her films: killer charisma, a sense of comedy, and precise facial expressions, even when they seem exaggerated. As we saw in the case of “Azrael” – a film in which her character didn’t say a word for an entire time because of a weird plot reason that doesn’t get a clear explanation – here, too, there is a limit to what her facial expressions are capable of expressing without supporting dialogue.

Weaving’s performance is outstanding, almost as usual, and not “eye candy” like other actresses who look great but demonstrate mediocre acting skills. Although Weaving does the most with what she has, as in some of her other films, the feeling is that with a more precise script, she could have been unforgettable.

Ray Nicholson proves that he is Jack Nicholson’s son, for better or worse. For better, because this young guy has talent. He manages to build the character of the crazy but overly kind person, who is a bit unaware of the situation, in a convincing way. On the other hand, some of the facial expressions and mimicry look as if they came out of his father’s factory, who, of course, did it better than him (not only in the film “The Shining” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” in which he played a person who is losing his mind or suffers from mental illness in advance). It’s unfair to compare an actor to his father, especially since his father is Jack Nicholson. This comparison is inevitable because Paul’s character is “Nicholson-esque” in essence. It would be fascinating to see the young Nicholson in other roles that are a little different from the “typecast” of “the son of,” which might reduce some comparisons that can’t do anyone any favors.

Paul’s character is also uneven and with insufficient construction, especially in the film’s last part, where the plot becomes a little crazy. I am far from an expert on mental illness. I’m not able to analyze precisely how a person who has borderline personality disorder should behave – if that’s the condition being diagnosed here and not just a reference to a Madonna song – but Paul’s character seemed a little uneven to me, and his behavior a little random even concerning a person with a complex mental state. This character appears friendly and amusing in his lack of awareness but not scary, and in a film about an obsessive fan, this somewhat harms the result.

The expectation is not for a perfect analysis of the human mind in the style of Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Still, the feeling is that with the many supporting characters, plot, or time jumps (there are just a few cases where the narrative change is done creatively, like in the scene with the dancing cop), something was lost there. There were cases where it seemed as if Paul’s behavior was intended only to “raise it” for the next joke, and this is a problem that some of the jokes here miss the mark.

Borderline Is A Broken And Uneven Film

“Borderline” movie combines several styles, perhaps even too many. On the surface, it’s a dark comedy about an obsessive fan, which probably says something about female stars in the ’90s and today (Weaving said that Sofia’s character was based on Madonna, but also Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera). There are some decent jokes here, some of them reflexive, and the final scenes are creative. The film deals with different types of relationships entertainingly – perhaps also related to gender or skin color – but subtly, without leaving a mark or saying anything of value.

At the same time, there is violence and a little blood, which explains why the film is on our website. All this is in a movie that combines the home invasion with the obsessive fan, two of the more enjoyable subgenres in the world of horror. The film depicts some mental state and includes a simple plot, which becomes crowded with characters, time jumps, and changes of perspective, especially regarding the people Paul sees before his eyes. It wouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to say that at specific points, Paul thinks someone else is Sofia and acts accordingly.

It could be that the film is deliberately messy and scattered to simulate the main character’s mental state, like Christopher Nolan’s masterful “Memento,” where the scenes appear in reverse chronological order to simulate the protagonist’s memory problems. Perhaps, but still, the result is that “Borderline” could have been a great pleasure, maybe even an iconic film. But in the end, it is wasted potential, a film that sometimes feels a little longer than its actual screen time. It is a film that includes some smart aspects on the screenwriting level but with a feeling that not everything connects perfectly.

From Stoned Bear to Crazy Fan

“Borderline” was written and directed by Jimmy Warden, a name that probably doesn’t tell you much because it’s the first film in his filmography in the director’s chair. As a man, he might be the envy of many men because he’s married to the same Samara Weaving, whom he met while working on the script for “The Babysitter: Killer Queen,” in which she played a too-small role).

“Borderline” sometimes feels like an adoration letter to his lover, whose character comes off with minimal damage compared to what one might expect. Forget about movies in which a husband who plays his wife abuses her on set or a character who is terrifying in his kind of cruelty. Here, the obsession that Paul plays with the object of his love is somewhat innocent, even childish, and the disturbed sides of his personality aren’t threatening enough for the average viewer (that is, the one who watches sicker and more brutal horror films).

Paul kills some people, of course, but he is not the scariest character here. The fact that Paul’s sidekick, and to some extent also the bully’s childhood friend, are responsible for most killings somewhat undermines the message the film is trying to convey. Instead of a life-and-death battle of wits between two characters, which could be an enormous pleasure like in the movie “The Babysitter” or “Ready or Not,” for example – speaking of Samara Weaving – we see the two in a somewhat anemic system, which leaves too much room for the supporting characters.

As a screenwriter, Warden is also responsible for “Cocaine Bear,” in which he acted in much the same way: that is, he took a true story (about a bear who died of an overdose after putting his mouth on a bag of cocaine in 1985) but treated it only as a starting point, the basis for a collection of stories whose common denominator is the struggle against a bear that becomes murderous like a slasher villain. “Cocaine Bear” also included comedic brilliance, but I think it was loaded with stories and characters that did not connect perfectly. Here, the connection is closer because the characters are still mostly related to each other, but sometimes it seems random. Once Warden connects the comedic points and the violent scenes to the point of creating a unified and interesting plot from beginning to end, we may get an interesting horror filmmaker worth following.

The bottom line is that “Borderline” deserves the mixed reviews it has received. On the positive side, there are well-made performances by the leading actors and some supporting actors, some successful jokes, and a plot that ultimately reaches a bizarre ending. On the other hand, there are some more mediocre performances by characters who should not have been given such a central place, some tired jokes, and an overly busy plot, which only partially connects to the final scenes. Under these conditions, it is also possible to understand why the film was distributed very limitedly worldwide and only grossed about a quarter of a million dollars, an amount lower than its budget. Streaming may improve the situation, but I still find it hard to believe we’ll get a memorable film here.

On the other hand, did we mention that this movie stars Samara Weaving and Jack Nicholson’s son?

Borderline (2025) – Frequently Asked Questions

Who directed Borderline? Screenwriter Jimmy Warden (“The Babysitter: Killer Queen”, “Cocaine Bear”) directed the film in his directorial debut.

Who plays in Borderline? Samara Weaving and Ray Nicholson are in the leading roles. The cast of Borderline also includes Eric Dane, Jimmie Fails, Alba Baptista, and Patrick Cox.

Who wrote Borderline? Jimmy Warden is also responsible for the screenplay.

How long is Borderline? The running time of the film is 94 minutes.

Where was the movie filmed? Principal photography and post-production took park in Vancouver, Canada.

What languages are spoken in the film? English

When was Borderline released to cinemas? The official release date of the movie in the United States was March 14, 2025

What was the budget of the Borderline movie? The estimated budget of the film is $5 million

How much did the movie gross? $276,000 only, according to Box Office Mojo

What is Borderline’s MPA rating (Parents Guide)? The movie is rated R for violence and language. It doesn’t have nudity on it.

Which reviews did Borderline get?

The reviews of Borderline are pretty average. It has a 5.4 rating on IMDB. On Rotten Tomatoes, about half of the professional critics (55%) gave it a positive review (“Tomatometer”).

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