BORDERLESS FOG
Indonesia, 2024, 111 minutes, Colour.
Putri Marino, Yoga Pratama, Lukman Sardi, Yudi Ahmad Tajudin.
Directed by Edwin.
A 2024 film, streamed on Netflix, Borderless Fog offers an opportunity for world audiences to have easy access to watching a contemporary Indonesian film, a thriller, murder mystery, detection. It also offers an opportunity to appreciate something of different styles of life, Asian atmosphere, racial complications, cultural traditions.
The setting is Borneo Island, the border between Malaysia and Indonesia, people moving across borders, passport requirements on the one hand, corruption and brown paper bags with cash on the other. It is remote from the capitals, a mixed area with Indonesians, Malays and local tribe, Dayaks.
The photography of the beauty of the island is striking, panoramic views, the density of the forests.
There are some grim aspects of the plot, serial killings. And, while the killings themselves are not shown, there are gruesome aspects of the results, bodies and severed heads. The local police are investigating, but few results.
Borderless Fog is very interesting in its central character, a female police officer sent from Jakarta, contemporary look and style, strong-minded, physically tough, taller than many of the men (and actress Putri Marino perhaps reminding us of the young Sigourney Weaver). She clashes with the local head, of course, finds support in his assistant, encounters a cooperative shopkeeper, works with a fiery local who wants to take the law into his own hands.
The plot is often quite complicated, requiring audience attention as to who is who and who is supporting whom.
Suddenly, the focus is on a van, a woman driving, young girls in the back, stranded at a swollen river – and then the revelation of the driver being one of the victims, and the realisation that this is a situation of human trafficking, proliferating along the Malay/international border.
Audiences will find the comparison between the detective’s methods and activities with those familiar from American or British police investigations very interesting. And, the officer herself is burdened by an episode in her past, pressure from her father, examples of police pressures and influence.
There are some twists, questioning of loyalties, the audience puzzling over who amongst the possibilities of suspects has actually been doing the killing, and why, possibly a crusade against the traffickers.
Underlying the realism of the killings and the investigation, are suggestions of ghostly presences in the forest, and influence on the behaviour of the locals. The filmmakers have decided to resolve the mystery but, with the ending, also suggest that there might be something in the mysterious ghostly presences in the forest.