Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

BORDERLINE
***½/****
starring Samara Weaving, Ray Nicholson, Jimmie Fails, Eric Dane
written and directed by Jimmy Warden

NOVOCAINE
*/****
starring Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Matthew Walsh
written by Lars Jacobson
directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen

by Walter Chaw Samara Weaving is the best Bruce Campbell since Bruce Campbell. They even worked together on the “Ash vs Evil Dead” show. Her timing is impeccable, her control over her physicality and facial expressions prodigious. She seems to have emerged specifically to anchor horror slapsticks like the second coming of Mabel Normand: a screwball Venus on a meshuga clamshell. Her short filmography is already heavy with cult classics like The Babysitter, Ready or Not, Guns Akimbo, and Joe Lynch’s fantastic Mayhem–each savvy enough to highlight Weaving’s charming, self-deprecating sense of humour. In another time, she would’ve given Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett a run for their money. She’s the dream improv partner, a champion bull rider. I don’t think there’s a scenario she wouldn’t seem unnatural in–no situation you could ask her characters to overcome that is too absurd. She’s a unicorn: the great beauty men think they might have a chance with and women don’t entirely resent. In her very small cameo in Babylon, she provides a tantalizing glimpse into what that film could have been with her in the lead instead of the ego doppelgänger to her id, Margot Robbie. Not good, mind you, but at least well-cast.

In Borderline, husband Jimmy Warden’s hyphenate debut, Weaving is Sofia, a pop star decorating magazine covers and bus shelters like the 1980s Madonna the title references. (There’s even a scene that pokes fun at Madonna’s notorious Truth or Dare documentary.) Sofia has a bodyguard, stoic father-figure Bell (Eric Dane), and a stalker, the addled Paul (Ray Nicholson), who, as the film opens, wanders onto Sofia’s compound to complete his mission of marrying his inamorata. With Bell in the way, Paul (maybe) murders him. What follows is an evening of Sofia being hunted through her mansion by Paul and his partners, Penny (Alba Baptista) and J.H. (Patrick Cox), while Sofia and her boyfriend-for-the-evening, Rhodes (Jimmie Fails), do what they can to elude them. There’s not much else to it–indeed, there are countless precedents for this basic cat-and-mouse premise–but Borderline realizes it’s fundamentally a showcase for its lead, a familiar framework bare enough that rather than distract with a puzzle box or twist, it simply allows Weaving to be inspired. I particularly love Sofia’s rapturous, inexplicable duet of a Celine Dion classic with one of her tormentors in the middle of a fight to the death. It’s not the idea of it so much as how Weaving and Warden commit to the bit. (And who better to shoot a movie star than her adoring spouse?) There’s another inspired moment, where mad Penny, seeing Weaving’s face up close, admits she’s…kinda disappointed with Sofia’s legendary beauty now that she’s seeing it up close, that lets Weaving register a dozen pained, hilarious responses before finally landing on a perfectly pitched, perfectly neutral grunt. Weaving is developing into a Jean Arthur archetype: too smart to be underestimated, too tough to be domesticated through marriage (both here and in Ready or Not). The universe and the Fates align to keep her single and dangerous. She is chaos. She is a goddess, and her holy power is fending off, sometimes exploding, disappointing men. All hail.

Ray Nicholson is no Samara Weaving, but we’re seeing a lot of him lately, too. He’s shockingly good in Smile 2 as a milquetoast who’s possibly evil; as the potentially evil but heroic Ray in Amazon’s “Panic”; and as sweetly addled, love-stoned, unambiguously evil Paul in Borderline. He sheds that sweetness to play homicidal bank robber Simon in Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s Novocaine, and it turns out his guileless duality constitutes most of his appeal. Still, Nicholson looks to be following co-star Jack Quaid’s career trajectory onto the A-list. In Novocaine, Quaid is nebbishy Nate, a bank manager born without the ability to feel pain. Nate falls in love with teller Sherry (Prey‘s Amber Midthunder, a future superstar) right before psychopath Simon (Nicholson) abducts her during a bloody robbery. Seeing his beloved being ferried away while the first responders have all been incapacitated, Nate throws discretion to the wind and sets off to rescue Sherry. The result is a distended film in which the only gag is body mortification on a body that can’t feel it. I don’t know that it’s funny the first time Nate has his hand degloved or his forehead split, but it’s definitely not funny the tenth and twentieth times. The picture works when it has him do a glass-knuckled call-out to Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Kickboxer; it doesn’t work during a bullet self-extraction that has only ever been portrayed on screen as the he-man’s grim, “pain don’t hurt” rite of passage. That’s the problem with Novocaine: this disability isn’t a superpower, after all, and the movie’s desperation to make it one is like a little kid so in need of attention that he tries to think of ways to be more obnoxious.

There’s a gag Novocaine sets up early where Nate explains he can’t eat anything yummy because he could bite his tongue off without knowing it, which… Okay, I’m ready. But even though the last shot of the film is of Nate chewing rapturously, enthusiastically, like the Jeff Bridges character eating deadly-to-him strawberries in Peter Weir’s Fearless, the sting isn’t blood shooting out of Nate’s mouth, but rather a happy ending in which this sadsack has finally learned to live deliciously. To have Novocaine ultimately fail in its promise to be lawless after the blindings, immolations, fractures, third-degree burns, et al. speaks loudly to its general lack of convictions. Compare it to this year’s The Monkey and Companion (and, yes, Borderline) for a barometer of how spineless Novocaine feels in what seems to be an escalating modern Olympics of desensitization. The fact that Novocaine is literally about a person who can’t feel anything should have given it a leg up in the Terrifier sweepstakes: Imagine the kinds of “Survivor Type” shenanigans a guy like Nate could get into if he were also a surgeon with a deep understanding of the geography of his anatomy. Instead, having run out of inspiration with about a third of the runtime still to go, the film resorts to Crank‘s gag of periodic bursts of self-administered adrenaline to get things rolling again. I don’t mind your high concepts, though I do notice when you’re defeated by them.

What works about Borderline is its intelligence, its consistent style and inventiveness, which align it with Mike Cheslik’s recent Hundreds of Beavers. Like it, Borderline is carefully thought-out and laser-focused on the simplicity of its framework while remaining determined to squeeze every last drop of inspiration from it. And it similarly feels like it shouldn’t work, yet it does. Someone’s thought it through and prevented others from pulling cards from its middle, and it’s not shy about foregrounding its greatest asset (Weaving). I do appreciate a couple of things about Novocaine, though–its willingness, for instance, to at least pay lip service to disability issues, however cursorily, in Nate’s explanation for how his difference led to bullying and his use of an alarm to tell him when to go to the bathroom. But mostly, Novocaine is interesting for its timing as an artifact. It appears as a literalization of our recent trend towards horror, highlighting the degree to which we have lost our ability to feel…anything. We are a depressed and conquered nation. We were groomed and pounded into submission by unceasing labour with no promise of relief, short of death. We were selected for our submissiveness and bred into docility by a diet of nonsense and atrocity. Borderline describes the unstable cornice we’re traversing above the abyss with a heroine who refuses to surrender to despair, whereas Novocaine radicalizes a tool of our collapse into a heedless, reckless romantic. I’m neither as resourceful as the one nor as purposeful as the other, but maybe there’s fight left in me. Maybe “fight” is all any of us have left.