Frontier(s)

Plot

A far-right candidate is elected to the French presidency, sparking riots in Paris. Hoping to escape Paris but needing cash, a street gang making up of Muslim Arab youths; Alex (Aurélien Wiik), Tom (David Saracino), Farid (Chems Dahmani), the pregnant Yasmine (Karina Testa), and her brother Sami (Adel Bencherif) take advantage of the chaos to pull off a robbery. Sami is shot and the group splits up: Alex and Yasmine take Sami to a hospital, and Tom and Farid take the money to a family-run inn near the border. Innkeepers Gilberte (Estelle Lefébure) and Klaudia (Amélie Daure) claim their rooms are free and seduce the two men.

At the hospital, the emergency room staff report Sami's injury to the police. Sami insists Yasmine run before the police catch her. His dying wish is that Yasmine not have an abortion. Alex and Yasmine flee, leaving the fatally wounded Sami behind. Alex and Yasmine phone their friends for directions to the inn. Tom and Farid give them directions but soon after are brutally attacked by Gilberte, Klaudia, and Goetz (Samuel Le Bihan). When Tom and Farid try to escape, Goetz runs their car off a cliff. The injured men wander into a mine shaft, where Tom is quickly recaptured. Farid must fend for himself in the mine with the family's rejected children. Unaware of the danger, Alex and Yasmine arrive at the inn and are captured by the family.

Alex and Yasmine are chained in a muddy-floored pig pen. Alex breaks Yasmine's chains and allows her to escape. When the captors discover Yasmine's escape, the family patriarch, von Geisler (Jean-Pierre Jorris), cuts Alex's Achilles tendons. Meanwhile, in the mine, Farid finds the storage area for the victims. The family realizes something is amiss in the mine, and Hans (Joël Lefrançois) chases Farid into a boiler where Farid is cooked alive. Yasmine flees from the inn but is quickly picked back up by Goetz. Back in the pig pen, von Geisler personally grants Alex's last wish, which is to be put down quickly. Initially, von Geisler wishes for Karl (Patrick Ligardes) to "wed" Yasmine to carry on the family lineage, but when von Geisler learns she is already pregnant, he entrusts her to the meek Eva (Maud Forget), who tells Yasmine that she came to the family in a very similar manner and that she is obedient because the family promised her that her parents would return for her some day. Eva also tells Yasmine of the rejected homeless children she and Hans care for in the mine.

Eventually, Eva leads Yasmine down to dinner, where the family awaits her. Von Geisler is revealed to be a former (and still practicing) Nazi who's lived at the inn since the end of WWII. Von Geisler offers up a toast to the new blood and Yasmine quickly grabs a large knife and takes von Geisler hostage. Hans grabs a shotgun and shoots and kills von Geisler in the confusion; Karl shoots Hans dead in turn. Yasmine escapes and is chased by Karl and Goetz into the mine. Yasmine eventually makes her way into one of the body storage rooms where she fights with Goetz. After a bloody struggle, she repeatedly hits him with an axe before impaling him on a rotating table saw. Karl catches Yasmine as she tries to return to the surface, but Eva comes to the rescue, blowing off Karl's head with a shotgun. Yasmine searches for car keys to escape, but is ambushed by Gilberte and Klaudia bearing sub-machine guns. During the shootout, Yasmine hits a gas tank, blowing up the room. Gilberte survives the explosion and attempts to kill Yasmine only to have her throat torn out by her. With everyone else in the neo-Nazi family dead, Yasmine tries to persuade Eva to leave with her, but Eva stays to take care of the children in the mine. On the road, Yasmine runs into a police blockade near the border where she surrenders to the authorities.

Cast

Release

Frontier(s) was intended to be one of the 8 Films to Die For at Horrorfest 2007, but when the MPAA gave the film an NC-17 rating, it was instead released unrated to ten US theaters for one weekend, grossing $9,913. It was released on DVD the following week.

Critical reception

The film received mixed reviews from critics. Film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 55%, based on 20 reviews, with a rating average of 5.4/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Perhaps slapdash with its aspirations toward message-making, this ultra-gory horror flick nonetheless delivers the bloody goods". Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 44 out of 100, based on 5 reviews.