Give me a new movie with this detective every year and I’ll watch it on day one
One arrival that’s gone under the radar so far among the new Netflix movies to arrive in August 2024 is Borderless Fog, a murder thriller set in Borneo, across the Indonesian and Malaysian border – it doesn’t even have enough reviews to have a Rotten Tomatoes score yet. It follows Inspector Sanja (Putri Marino, who is great) as an instantly iconic new detective – unmistakeable with her close-cropped curly hair and doctor-prescribed pink sunglasses – as she investigates a strange decapitated corpse left on the border between the countries, which does have a head… just the wrong head.
What follows is an astoundingly dense and thematically interesting mystery that has the dark tones, character motivations and morally unclear vibes of a whole Danish murder series like The Killing or The Bridge, but squeezed into under two hours… and yet somehow isn’t impossible to follow. It doesn’t quite all tie together satisfying enough to make it into the best Netflix movies list, but as a connoisseur of the mid-tier detective thriller genre, I had a great time with it, and I’d quite happily watch a yearly Inspector Sanja movie where she looks moodily over beautiful and ominous jungle landscapes.
Watch Borderless Fog on Netflix now
Borderless Fog starts with a nice little ‘slice of life in Borneo’ scene, before the corpse starts the mystery with a literal bang (on a tin roof), and falls onto the border between the two countries. The movie gets straight into the themes that will underpin the whole story as two police forces argue that the other should have to deal with based on the border placement, with the disagreement not only reaching the point where they measure its distance from the exact border, but then question where the border really is here in the middle of the forest.
