MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Borrower’: Terror Touched With Realism

“The Borrower” (Laemmle’s Monica) is a horror movie that never lets us indulge in the dubious elation of sadism. Directed by John McNaughton, it’s distilled horror: very grim, very compact and, despite the lurid surrealism and mad jokes of its plot, often disturbingly real.

It’s a pretty nutsy movie, shot in a surreally distended mixture of Chicago and L.A. locations, by a director (“Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”) whose sensibility soars far above the seeming squalidness of his material. The central gimmick, by screenwriters Mason Nage and Richard Fire, gives us an extraterrestrial exiled to Earth as punishment, who has to rip off the head of a fresh human victim to replace his own every day or so.

That head-swapping device makes the movie kin to body-stealing thrillers like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” In a way, the movie also reprises the psychosis of the serial killer, which McNaughton has now dealt with in both a dramatic and comic fashion. But in this case, there’s an added horrific specificity. The psychosis has taken on flesh, including a scene where the alien eats a dead rat tossed into his soup at a homeless mission.

Yet, there’s more to McNaughton than cheap thrills or tasteless gore.

This head-snatching extraterrestrial is an ultimate alienated protagonist, and his misadventures are juxtaposed with those of two cops, feral Rae Dawn Chong and intense Don Gordon, tracking down him and another serial killer. McNaughton obviously plays a lot of this for shock and comedy, but he’s grounded almost all of it in a recognizable environment.

“The Borrower” (MPAA-rated R for sex, language, violence) is full of offbeat detail, observed with a deadly straight face: the bottle-style silencer that caps one of the hunter’s guns, the carefully layered trash in a bum’s shopping cart. It’s that fascinatingly flat, incongruous reality that sets McNaughton apart and that makes him, along with Guy Maddin (“Tales of the Gimli Hospital”) one of the best and most interesting filmmakers to emerge from the underground in recent years.

McNaughton applies a documentarian’s tools to material with an inner core of sheer craziness. He anatomizes the culture’s underbelly, using stark and nauseating material to illuminate the deeper horrors of contemporary life: the horror of madness and murder as well as the horror of helplessness and blankness.

‘The Borrowers’

Rae Dawn Chong: Diana Pierce

Don Gordon: Charles Krieger

Antonio Fargas: Julius

A Cannon Pictures presentation of a Vision Pictures production. Director John McNaughton. Producers R. P. Sekon, Steven A. Jones. Executive producer William H. Coleman. Screenplay by Mason Nage, Richard Fire. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (Violence, language, sex, nudity).