When Shen Congwen’s novel Border Town was adapted into a movie, the original idea of director Ling Zifeng was to make it into a poetic movie with the style of the original novel. An in-depth study of the adaptation of Border Town from the perspective of poetic film shows that the director pays too much attention to the continuity and fluency of narration and pursues the real and natural overall style in the adaptation. The film finally presents a style with traditional Hollywood characteristics, a prominent documentary tendency and a lack of fantasy and poetic temperament of the original novel. The breakthrough and limitation caused by his poetic and realistic adaptation also reflects the problem that the traditional narrative film language cannot control poetic films.