Borrego movie review & film summary (2022)
The movie begins quietly, virtually meditatively, with spectacular drone photographs of the desert, pitiless and gigantic in its isolation and vastness. A small determine strolls by the desolation, sometimes squatting down to see on the random yellow flowers, blooming by the cracked mud and rock. That is Elly (Lucy Hale), a botanist doing a plant survey, looking for these flowers which, as she explains later, “aren’t purported to be right here.” An apt metaphor for Elly’s eventual expertise: she’s “not supposed” to be on the market both. On her means dwelling, she witnesses a small aircraft crash into the desert. Horrified, she drives over to see if she may also help, solely to seek out the pilot, a person named Tomas (Leynar Gomez), injured however alive, surrounded by two large bricks of what are clearly medicine. He trains his pistol on her. Elly frantically negotiates, telling him she will be able to take him to the place he must go (the Salton Sea space on the Southern finish of California). Tomas and his hostage set off into the night time.
Different figures are lively within the desert. There’s Alex (Olivia Trujillo), a teenage lady enjoying hooky from college, who comes throughout Elly within the afternoon earlier than the aircraft crashes. Alex is unusually drawn to this older (however not by a lot) lady. Alex’s dad Jose (Nicholas Gonzalez) is a neighborhood sheriff, overwhelmed by what is going on on out within the desert. Then there’s Guillermo (Jorge A. Jimenez), a harmful dude dwelling in a trailer, selecting up the medicine that arrive and shifting them on by the distribution channels. When Jose fails to indicate up, Guillermo, fearing he is been double-crossed, begins the hunt for the lacking pilot.
These three story-lines trudge alongside on separate pathways till lastly converging, in spurts of violence, on-foot chases, and mountain-canyon shoot-outs. Elly and Jose, pressured to proceed their journey on foot after a collision with a cactus, kind an uncommon bond.
The tempo is usually fairly sluggish, with Elly and Jose’s meandering journey dominating. The slowness will not be essentially an issue. It permits area for the bigger points drowning these two characters, these severe bookended texts concerning the gigantism of the pharmaceutical downside. Watching their dynamic, one can think about a really totally different sort of movie, with no shoot-outs or automobile chases, a movie that permits this relationship to develop past bullet-pointed backstories. Lucy Hale is plausible in her wrestle to outlive (though she by no means exhibits any indicators of being sweaty, regardless of staggering throughout the desert for 2 days underneath a blazing solar), and Leynar Gomez is heartbreaking as a person who is not actually violent, however pressured to it.
