Claudia (Veronica Sixtos), 22 yeards old, is a pocha, slang for a Mexican who has left their country (mostly for the U.S.), turned their back on their culture, and can't speak Spanish. Claudia's just fine with living abroad, until she gets deported and has to move in with her estranged father in her native country, which might as well be alien to her.
Michael Dwyer's Hostile Border is a movie about immigrants and the harsh realities they face when crossing over, only this time it's the other way around, with Claudia having to adapt to her homeland. Most movies about the immigrant experience center on hard-working, salt-of-the-earth types; Claudia is the total opposite, a brat who's not above getting her hands dirty and makes a lot of questionable choices (Pocha also refers to rotten fruit, and she's definitely a bad apple). While this is ultimately about her personal journey, rooting for her is sometimes tough.
Front and center in almost every scene, Sixtos plays everything low-key; so low-key, in fact, that Claudia barely says more than 10 words at any one time and looks utterly bored by what goes on around her. This might work for the character, but it makes siding with her a hard task - especially since the other actors surrounding her are far more charismatic.
Jesse García from the From Dusk Till Dawn TV series makes for a shifty, questionable military man; Roberto Urbina, the Colombian Jesse Pinkman (from Metastasis, the latino Breaking Bad) is the drug dealer Veronica throws her lot in with, a cold-blooded killer behind his charming smile; and Julio Cedillo, the unfortunate recipient of Benicio del Toro's wrath in Sicario, is a gruff, stoic presence as Veronica's hard-working dad. Sixtos may be the lead, but her three co-stars would have made equally interesting protagonists.
Claudia's story does make a strong point about the immigrant experience: is the American Dream really worth going through so many hardships as an illegal? Our protagonist ends up in search of an identity, one she can't find either in the U.S. or her own homeland. That's the downside of immigration you probably won't hear about much, and this film tries to bring it to the fore. It's too low-key to be a pulse-pounding thriller, but it works just fine as a drama with something to say.
Hostile Border opens today in select U.S. markets, as well as on VOD, from Samuel Goldwyn Films.