One arrival that’s gone under the radar so far among the new Netflix movies to arrive in August 2024 is Borderless Fog, a murder thriller set in Borneo, across the Indonesian and Malaysian border – it doesn’t even have enough reviews to have a Rotten Tomatoes score yet. It follows Inspector Sanja (Putri Marino, who is great) as an instantly iconic new detective – unmistakeable with her close-cropped curly hair and doctor-prescribed pink sunglasses – as she investigates a strange decapitated corpse left on the border between the countries, which does have a head… just the wrong head.
What follows is an astoundingly dense and thematically interesting mystery that has the dark tones, character motivations and morally unclear vibes of a whole Danish murder series like The Killing or The Bridge, but squeezed into under two hours… and yet somehow isn’t impossible to follow. It doesn’t quite all tie together satisfying enough to make it into the best Netflix movies list, but as a connoisseur of the mid-tier detective thriller genre, I had a great time with it, and I’d quite happily watch a yearly Inspector Sanja movie where she looks moodily over beautiful and ominous jungle landscapes.
Borderless Fog starts with a nice little ‘slice of life in Borneo’ scene, before the corpse starts the mystery with a literal bang (on a tin roof), and falls onto the border between the two countries. The movie gets straight into the themes that will underpin the whole story as two police forces argue that the other should have to deal with based on the border placement, with the disagreement not only reaching the point where they measure its distance from the exact border, but then question where the border really is here in the middle of the forest.
The movie’s overarching theme is about things that sit between two camps, never fitting quite into either. The first body is a mismatched head and torso, which lands on the border between two countries, and will be investigated by a misfit city cop struggling to fit into the countryside, partnered someone who grew up with tribal radicals but became a cop and isn’t full accepted by either side… the movie doesn’t want any simple archetypes, which also helps to make sure that anyone who seems more simply good or evil instantly arouses your suspicion, because nothing’s that simple here in the fog, where cutaway shots of ominous native trees watch over the forest like veiled gods.
This all also leads into just what a dense series of plots are happening here. Once we’ve had our introductions to the concepts above, we’ll have to deal with a crime victim that may be sacrificial false flag murder, a local crime boss, a communist hero living in woods who may or may not be folklore, kidnapped children on a survival hike through the forest, and Sanja confronting her boss about his seeming corruption or incompetence… and those aren’t spoilers, because it all happens within the first half of the movie. While I admit to losing some threads, the fact that I could follow the plot along when it’s thicker than the Borneo jungle’s foliage is a testament to solid filmmaking.
It’s great-looking at times too, with a muted palette and theatening landscape shots again making it feel like a Scandinavian crime drama transplanted to south-east Asia, while occasionally adding some break-out kinetic energy – one short sequence of boats feels straight from a Michael Mann movie, and I wish the movie had brought more of that style, actually. The director, Edwin, has won awards before, and keeps the movie engaging no matter what’s happening.
As I mentioned above, I would call this an instant classic. The various threads don’t tie together neatly and fully satisfyingly, though it certainly gets dramatic. And more than that, despite there being a ton of work to match the themes with the characters, it doesn’t really deliver on your investment in the characters who aren’t Sanja – and you feel more for her is heavily due to Putri Marino being the strongest performer.
But even if it doesn’t dig deep enough, it scratches the surface of so many different elements that it can’t help but be interesting all the time, especially in the way it revels among the complexity of the characters’ relationships with the Dayak tribal people, with the history of communism, and with the relationship between Indonesian and Malaysian officials. And like I said, it somehow does all this in under 120 minutes. What’s the excuse of all these much more basic action movies that can’t bring themselves to come under two and half hours?
