An arrival that has gone unnoticed until now among the new Netflix movies coming in August 2024 is Fog without bordersa murder thriller set in Borneo, across the border between Indonesia and Malaysia, that doesn't even have enough reviews to have a score on Rotten Tomatoes. It follows Inspector Sanja (Putri Marino, who is great) as an instantly iconic new detective, unmistakable with her close-cropped curly hair and doctor-prescribed pink sunglasses, as she investigates a strange, decapitated corpse dumped on the border between the countries, which does have a head… just the one mistaken head.
What follows is a surprisingly dense and thematically interesting mystery that has the dark tones, character motivations, and morally unclear vibes of an entire Danish murder series like the murder either The bridgebut condensed into less than two hours… and yet somehow not impossible to follow. Not everything is satisfactorily connected to make it onto a list of the best Netflix movies, but as a connoisseur of the mid-level crime thriller genre, I had a great time and would gladly watch an annual Inspector Sanja movie in which she looks sadly at beautiful and sinister jungle landscapes.
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Fog without borders It begins with a small scene of life in Borneo, before the corpse kicks off the mystery with a literal crash (on a tin roof) and falls on the border between the two countries. The film directly addresses the themes that will underpin the entire story, as two police forces argue over what the other should deal with based on the location of the border, and the disagreement not only gets to the point where they measure the distance from the exact border, but then question where the border actually is here, in the middle of the forest.
The film’s main theme is about things that fall between two sides and never quite fit into either. The first body is a mismatched head and torso that lands on the border between two countries and is to be investigated by a misfit city cop struggling to fit in in the countryside, who has as a partner someone who grew up with tribal radicals but became a cop and isn’t fully accepted by either side… the film doesn’t want simple archetypes, which also helps ensure that anyone who seems more than simply good or bad instantly arouses suspicion, because nothing is that simple here in the fog, where cutaway shots of sinister native trees watch over the forest like veiled gods.
All of this also brings us to the dense series of plots at play here. Once we’ve had our introductions to the above concepts, we’ll have to deal with a victim of a crime that may be a sacrificial false flag murder, a local crime boss, a communist hero living in the woods who may or may not be part of folklore, children kidnapped on a survival trek through the woods, and Sanja confronting her boss about his apparent corruption or incompetence… and those aren’t spoilers, because it all happens within the first half of the film. While I admit to losing a few threads, the fact that I was able to follow the plot when it’s thicker than the foliage of the Borneo jungle is a testament to solid filmmaking.
It looks great at times, too, with a muted color palette and brooding landscape shots that make it look like a Scandinavian crime drama transplanted to Southeast Asia, though it does occasionally add some kinetic energy—a short boat sequence looks like something out of a Michael Mann film, and I wish the film had incorporated more of that style, actually. The director, Edwin, has won awards before, and he keeps the film engaging no matter what's going on.
As I mentioned earlier, I'd say it's an instant classic. The various threads don't connect in a clear and satisfying way, though it certainly gets dramatic. And more than that, even though there's a lot of work done to blend the themes with the characters, it doesn't really deliver on your commitment to the characters other than Sanja, and the fact that you feel more for her is largely because Putri Marino is the better performer.
But even if you don't dig deep enough, you scratch the surface of so many different elements that you can't help but be… interesting All the time, especially in the way it revels in 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 as I said, it somehow accomplishes all this in under 120 minutes. What's the excuse for all these much more basic action movies that can't manage to run under two and a half hours?
