If you’ve watched anything on cable in the past couple
weeks, you might have seen the trailer for the new film The Neighbor, a horror film out this week from Marcus Dunstan, the
man behind the Saw sequels, and starring
comedian Bill Engvall in his first truly dark and dramatic role. Having seen
the film, and keeping this trailer in mind, it’s actually rather difficult to
talk about this movie without giving too much away.
Trailers are an interesting aspect of the movie-going
experience. They very often wind up shaping how we feel about a movie overall.
If it highlighted something that ultimately wasn’t in that much of the movie,
like The Joker in Suicide Squad, we
leave the theater disappointed. If the trailer shows too much of the plot, like
with last summer’s disastrous Terminator
Genysis, we feel ripped off that we’ve seen the whole movie now before we even
bought a ticket.
A more recent yet just as frustrating trend, however, is
for trailers to just straight up show the ending of a movie out of context to
promote the film. About halfway through the latest X-Men movie, for example, we all realized that the cool scenes we’ve
seen in the trailers (Jennifer Lawrence leading the young team) hadn’t happened
yet, and wouldn’t happen until the team is reunited again… at the end of the
movie. We’d been spoiled by the very thing that made us want to see it in the
first place. When the movie finished and that scene came up, any sense of
surprise or excitement was gone, because we literally already saw it coming.
This kind of mismarketing is usually reserved to expand a more indescribable
movie to a wider audience by twisting one interesting moment into seeming like
it represents the movie as a whole. Unfortunately, The Neighbor is another example of that X-Men Apocalypse marketing strategy, as that preview has very
little to do with most of the film.
In the vaguest and most carefully worded terms I can
manage, The Neighbor tells the story
of a young couple who are wrapped up in the underground drug trade and just one
job away from being out of the business for good. Unfortunately for them, their
mysterious neighbor, played by Bill Engvall, has secrets of his own, and seems
to know more about their business than he lets on. Things then take a turn for
the spooky when our heroes finally go next door and have to confront this sinister
figure in the neighborhood.
It seems that’s about all I can say about the plot. Clearly,
this was very different than the movie I was told to expect.They spend about a
solid hour at the top of the film exploring the character’s lives and
motivations before any kind of action or suspense kicks in. While under
different circumstances a structure like this might work to the benefit of a
story, The Neighbor does not seem to
actually be interested in its plot, making this first hour feel like it’s just
killing time until the end. Much like the marketing I’ve been complaining about,
the whole movie seems to really just want to get right to that violent climax
and just trudge through the story, which ultimately made for a rather
unexciting film overall.
The ad campaign suggests that this is a graphic and
disturbing movie more in line with the other works of director Dunstan, like Saw IV or The Collector, when in reality, it’s actually a far more suspense
driven, psychological scare the film is after. The torture and violence the
previews promise doesn’t actually start up until the very end of the movie, and
even then it’s under wildly different circumstances than you’ve been sold. I
would, therefore, imagine that fans of the filmmaker’s previous work might find
themselves ultimately disappointed by the relatively tame Neighbor. Personally, I like my horror to be less reliant on blood
and more on atmosphere, so I was a bit pleasantly surprised by what the movie actually
turned out to be. That being said, I still wish they accomplished it better.
Films like the original Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, for example, manage to slowly build up to crazy violence without
boring the audience during the first act of the story. The Neighbor seemed to move too ahead of itself, always focused on
what’s coming next as opposed to the scene right now.
While the visuals, editing, and performances are all
strong, none of them are able to make the poorly structured script exciting. The Neighbor is a rather unexciting
thriller.
Rating: 2 out of 5
