Borrego, the 2022 thriller starringLucy Hale, was recently released on Netflix and has quickly topped the charts. The film follows Hale’s Elly, a botanist exploring the desert to survey the arrival of a plant species that isn’t supposed to be in the desert when a plane crashes nearby. Upon her arrival at the site, she realizes the plane is full of drugs right before the injured pilot begins to try to kill her.
Fast on her feet, Elly makes a deal with the pilot, Tomas (Leynar Gomez), to use her expertise of the area to help them escape the desert, buying her a little more time to find her way out of this deadly situation. As Elly and Tomas make their way through the desert — first headed to the Salton Sea, then back to Borrego Springs — another is following their tracks: Guillermo (Jorge A. Jimenez), the man who’s waiting for the drugs to arrive. And, while Elly was able to convince Tomas to spare her (at least temporarily), Guillermo is not one to be swayed, considering he murdered two hikers in cold blood when they ran into him at the site of Elly’s crashed Jeep. Even though Elly doesn’t know this man is after them, it raises the threat level exponentially and leaves her fate uncertain as they weave through the desert, trying to survive in the extreme heat with a limited amount of water and no food. Death is knocking.
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In the end, Tomas is killed by Guillermo, which is actually a surprising disappointment. He’s not a good man by any means, but he didn’t kill Elly, and we learn more about his devastating fall into the drug business. Guillermo dies, too, and the drugs are destroyed, partially due to the help of Sheriff Jose Gomez (Nicholas Gonzalez) and his daughter Alex (Olivia Trujillo). However, not before Guillermo shoots Elly in the abdomen, and she starts to bleed out, so much so that Elly collapses while escaping on the back of Alex’s dirt bike, putting them both in harm’s way. Once Elly burns Guillermo alive, Jose finally catches up to Elly and Alex, embracing his daughter with a tight squeeze… while Elly continues to bleed out on the ground. The film’s final shot is Elly’s view of a lone buttercup flower in the desert, then cut to black. After Elly’s near-death experiences inBorrego, leaving things with her bleeding out in the middle of the desert, at least an hour to civilization of any kind, is just sodisappointing. This ending makes the entire film fall flat, as it doesn’t feel like the completion of the journey. Instead, it’s a mere stopping point, but doesn’t tie everything — oranything, really — together.
Before we meet Elly, she’s haunted. In a heart-to-heart with her captor, Elly reveals why she is even in Borrego Springs, and it’s because she’s running. Running from her past, from her mother, from the guilt of what she’s done. Turns out, Elly struggled with an addiction of her own, which resulted in her little sister dying in a car accident after Elly had been awake for three days and agreed to drive her to school. Elly watched her sister die next to her, and she’s felt responsible for it ever since. At the beginning of the film, before we learn all of this, Elly pulls out a pill bottle in her car. So, it seems, her addiction has not been fully managed since her sister’s death, but it’s incredibly unclear. In lieu of facing her demons, Elly just continues to stay away from her home, running away and taking projects like this one in Borrego Springs that leave her isolated. After watching Elly endure this terrible turn of events, it’s a bit puzzling to see where the film ends. Elly looks at a buttercup flower, a symbol of the nickname “Buttercup” that her little sister gave her, but that’s it. There’s nothing to imply that anything in Elly’s life will change after this experience, just a simple flower to represent what led her into the desert. Sure, it can be implied that Elly saving Alex from Guillermo was a metaphor for Elly finally getting the chance to “save” her little sister. There was clearly something in Alex that reminded Elly of her sister. Otherwise, the film had a better end for Jose and Alex, as they “saved the day” together and protected their home — a home that many overlook because it is so isolated from the outside world. They’re reunited, safe, and ready to return home as a closer daddy/daughter duo than they were upon our first introduction. Elly isn’t so lucky.
By the end, we should have had answers, in some form, to the biggest questions posed by Elly’s backstory, as she was undeniably the lead character. After this, will Elly stop running? Will she return home and face her guilt over what happened and tackle her addiction? Those are her biggest issues, but they’re left unaddressed by the film’s end. And, given how the characters repeatedly implied that getting help out in the desert was nearly impossible, Elly’s survival doesn’t even seem likely. She collapsed from blood loss while trying to escape with Alex, and her shirt is drenched in blood by the time she manages to light the drugs on the fire. Even if Elly were going to die to end the film, it should have happened on-screen, rather than being left as a giant unbelievable question mark.
All in all, the questions thatBorregoleaves us with make Elly’s fight for survival fall short. It’s an incredibly interesting ride along the way, with an incredible performance by Hale, but the ending ruins it. It’s quite anticlimactic and doesn’t do the characters justice. All of this time getting to know Elly, Jose, and Alex for nothing to come of it, as we leave them before they’ve even fully escaped their misadventures through this desert hell. There was more to say, more to see, and more to understand before leaving these characters. Without this,Borregoends up a rather forgettable watch, as the characters and multiple side storylines introduced fail to make their full impact.
