The Neighbor (2016)

Directed by: Marcus Dunstan | 84 minutes | crime, horror, thriller | Actors: Josh Stewart, Bill Engvall, Alex Essoe, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Luke Edwards, Melissa Bolona, ​​Skipp Sudduth, Mason Guccione, David Kallaway, Jaqueline Fleming, Heather Williams, Chaka Desilva, Ben Matheny, Artrial Clark, Jered Meeks, Brett Forbes , Phillip Rush

Unfortunately, you don’t always have the choice of the neighbors, a fact that in daily practice often guarantees the necessary resentment. Sometimes neighbor disputes even develop into heated arguments or the people in the house next to you turn out to be just terrifying. ‘The Neighbor’ is a film that picks up on this latter theme and provides it with an extra dark edge. In this print we meet John and Rosie, a couple with a criminal history who, to escape a turbulent life history, settle in the American town of Cutter (Mississippi). Their neighbor Troy is not a pleasant gentleman. One day, Rosie sees Troy in his garden chasing an injured man and brutally knocking the victim to the ground. Just then, the eerie neighbor turns and looks Rosie straight in the eye. Later that evening, John comes home and discovers that Rosie is gone. Because the money and other valuables in the house are still untouched, he suspects that something is wrong. John investigates the neighbors and discovers a macabre cellar that harbors a gruesome secret…

Given the popularity of the genre and the never-ending stream of new releases, it is not easy to make a horror film that rises to great heights in terms of quality and originality. Many films are a repetition of moves within a fairly exhausted segment. That partly also applies to ‘The Neighbor’. The pattern of the cryptic eccentric, who carries out all kinds of morbid things in the privacy of his house, has been executed more often and better (think of ‘The Burbs’ or ‘The People under the Stairs’). The story that forms the basis for ‘The Neighbor’ is also meager, fairly saltless and predictable, while the main characters John and Rosie are also mostly empty and uninteresting.

Yet ‘The Neighbour’ is not a complete no-brainer. On a narrative and character level, it doesn’t end there, but the film does take an interesting look at the raw survival mechanisms that are anchored in the DNA of almost every human (or other animal). Faced with life-threatening horrors, the bestial in us takes over and we are often capable of things we could not have imagined even in our wildest dreams. That fact results in some interesting scenes in ‘The Neighbor’. Although the tension is initially dosed and skillfully built up, director Marcus Dunstan makes a few giant leaps towards the end that smooth the path to the final denouement much too quickly. This contradiction with the lingering start, in which a lot of time is set aside for sketching the story framework, creates an uneasy imbalance.

The final verdict is therefore that ‘The Neighbor’ is a mediocre horror film that is not a spectacular enrichment for the genre. The film isn’t a complete disappointment and manages to entertain quite a bit on occasion, but it’s all too little to impress the die-hard horror and thriller aficionados among us.