Mark Reviews Movies: BORREGO

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 13, 2022

A spare thriller set in a sparse environment, writer/director Jesse Harris' Borrego is little more than an extended, slow-moving, and multi-party chase across a great expanse of California desert. It's methodical in pacing and in maintaining a sense of grounded realism, but there's scant meat on this barebones plot.

The movie begins and ends with some text, reciting some details and numbers about the contemporary drug trade—specifically in terms of the epidemic of prescription drug abuse. None of that really matters to Harris' story, which uses a shipment of drugs from Mexico to the United States as nothing more than a MacGuffin.

A similar attitude is employed for the various characters who become entangled in a failed drug delivery. The main figure is Elly (a quiet and contemplative Lucy Hale, who's quite good in a role that demands physical and emotional exhaustion—but provides little more for the actor), a botanist who has come to the desert to study and track an invasive plant species. She's alone and a loner, after some tragedy that isn't revealed until much later, which prevents any sense of humanity from entering the story until then.

She's mostly a pawn to move through the desert. She's on her own at first, briefly accompanied by local school-skipping teenager Alex (Olivia Trujillo) soon after, and has a second companion for most of the remainder of the tale. He's Tomas (Leynar Gomez), the pilot of a small-engine plane that crashes just as Elly is about to make the return trip to the motel where she's staying. She rushes over to the help the man, only to find him surrounded by packages of a pharmaceutical opioids.

He shoots at and chases Elly, but she convinces Tomas that he needs her alive—not only to help carry all the drugs, but also because he has no idea where he is, where he's going, and what direction any which way is. The two set out for the Salton Sea, where Tomas was supposed to land his plane and meet a local drug trafficker.

That man is Guillermo (Jorge A. Jimenez), a mostly silent and brooding force with a one-track mind, set on finding Tomas and the drugs, and a quick temper. After he finds the plane wreckage and starts tracking the two travelers, the local Sheriff Jose (Nicholas Gonzalez), whose department is inconveniently understaffed (although it's convenient for matters of extending the chase), gets a call that Elly has disappeared. Luckily, Alex is the Sheriff's daughter, and she puts her dad on the right track to finding the missing botanist. Unluckily, that path is also right behind the violent and determined Guillermo.

If this seems like a lot of description for such a simple story, the other side of it is that this is basically the full extent of the plot, the ideas, and the characterizations within this narrative. Elly and her background remain a mystery, although we know she's avoiding her mother and keeps a token of some close relationship from the past close to her. It's only a matter of time before we learn about that troubled past, but until then, she and Tomas just keep driving, walking, and quietly bonding—despite the fact that she's his hostage—on their way to the drop-off location.

The same can be said of Tomas, who's portrayed quite skillfully by Gomez in a tricky role. The man seems a threat initially, but there's a desperation in the character's eyes, as well as a growing softness to his speaking and manner, that suggests more to Tomas. Again, it's only a matter of time before we learn his side of the story—how he ended up on that plane and transporting drugs. All of that comes in a particularly effective scene, in which Elly and Tomas—breaking both a language barrier and the most obvious obstacle between some kind of acceptance (him trying to kill her, tying her up, and forcing her at gunpoint to haul a bunch of drugs)—come to some shared understanding of how life hasn't played out the way they each planned and hoped.

There's nothing akin to that scene, that relationship, or that basic degree of characterization for the others here. Guillermo is the unstoppable villain, tracking his targets with one-track determination and a willingness to kill anyone who gets in his way (Harris tries to give him a thin layer of humanity near the end—far too late for it mean anything and not nearly enough to explain away a series of very dumb decisions during the climax). Jose and Alex are primarily along for the ride—and mostly, almost amusingly ineffectual until the climactic chase requires them to get their act together.

Harris gives us a broad sense of the isolation of these characters and the difficulties of this situation by way of the desert backdrop (Octavio Arias' cinematography is beautifully stark in its natural lighting). That isn't enough, though, to compensate for the thinness of story, theme, and character within Borrego.

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