Terror Comes Knocking: The Marcela Borges Story (Cineflix Productions, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 12) I watched a couple of Lifetime movies in their typical “thriller Sundays” vein and then a bizarre fairy-tale film from 1918 on Turner Classic Movies. The first Lifetime film was the one that had “premiered” the night before but which I’d skipped because I wanted to watch the Judy Holliday features Born Yesterday and The Solid Gold Cadillac on TCM. It was called Terror Comes Knocking: The Marcela Borges Story, and was based on a real-life home invasion that took place in Winter Garden, Florida from November 15 through 17, 2009. Marcela Borges (Dascha Polanco) and her husband Rubens Loreano Morais (Johnathan Sousa) are having a quiet evening at home celebrating their son Ryan’s (Alessio Andrada) graduation from kindergarten (they have graduation ceremonies at kindergarten? I remember being so appalled by my eighth-grade graduation I deliberately avoided going to my high-school and college graduations) when they hear a knock on the door. Ryan actually opens the door for the three home-invasion robbers, Miguel Diaz-Santiz (Marito Lopez), Victor Manuel Sanchez (Mitchell Jaramillo), and Oscar Diaz-Hernandez (Ivan Lopez). The three young men enter with guns drawn and hold the family hostage. They announce that they are demanding $200,000 ransom from them, and if the money isn’t paid in 24 hours they will kill all of them. The hostage-takers tell the family that they answer to a higher-up, and in a legitimate surprise that turns out to be a young woman, Bianca Dos Santos (Nisa Gunduz), who’s first shown as an icon of butch-evil sexiness in a black shirt and skin-tight black jeans. Eventually she enters the scene and she and her male associates are all wearing masks to conceal their identities. There are two attempts by Rubens to grab one of the guns, which one of the gangsters has dropped on the floor, but both times they catch him in time.

Later there’s a scene in which Marcela, alone with Bianca, manages to grab her and hold a knife to her throat. Does she do what any halfway sensible person would do – call 911 and get the police out there, especially since she’s got her cell phone in her hand? No-o-o-o-o, she rather lamely threatens Bianca until her male henchmen re-enter the scene and hold their guns on Marcela, forcing her to drop the knife. Marcela vainly tries to reason with Bianca, pleading for the life of her unborn child (it’s already been established that she’s pregnant with the couple’s second son, and that Rubens’s trucking business took a hit from the 2008 economic crash but has now been rebuilt), and later Bianca mocks her appeal and indicates she’s going to show her no mercy just because she’s a fellow female and pregnant. Bianca’s attitude is so merciless and nasty I kept waiting for an explanation in Crystal Verge’s script that there was some sort of personal connection between the two women’s families and Bianca was seeking not only money but revenge. But it turns out merely that Bianca’s mother once did Rubens’s taxes, and that’s how she knew so much about the family’s finances. Terror Comes Knocking is a nicely done story, more than decently directed by Felipe Rodriguez, and I give Lifetime and its producing company, Cineflix, a lot of credit for using actual Latinos and Latinas both in front of and behind the cameras. I also give the casting director (uncredited on imdb.com) for finding genuinely Latino/a actors for the leading roles on both sides of the moral divide. But the film suffers from its monotony; all too many of its scenes merely show the villains beating the shit out of the good guys and it gets tiresome after a while. I’ve written before that Lifetime’s movies are generally better when they’re based on true stories – and, judging from Shivangi Sinja’s online posts at https://moviedelic.com/marcela-borges/, this movie (unlike many of Lifetime’s previous ones, including films advertised merely as “inspired by” rather than “based on” a true story) hews quite closely to the facts of the case – but not this time. The film they showed immediately after it, The Bear Lake Murders, had stronger, more complex characterizations and a much more credible storyline even though it, unlike Terror Comes Knocking, was entirely fictional.