The Good Neighbor (2016)

While we're looking at movies about neighbours!

A year on from watching this movie and I can barely tell you anything about it. It was the kind of movie that left me completely cold. Not the good kind of cold - that’s a special thing, reserved for movies that are horrible to you like Funny Games - but rather unmoved, and like the whole thing hadn’t really done much.

It’s a strangely passive movie where you watch people watching - two insufferable teenagers decide to do an experiment convincing their neighbour he is being haunted. A story gets told, but none of the characters change or grow or do much of anything.The positives come from the integration of found footage without it being a wholly found footage film - it put you in the front row without feeling cheap or unclear - and generally decent performances. Sadly, those mean less when the cast are working with a story that needs a lot more fleshing out.

I suspect there was a lot more that they wanted to do with the psychological trauma element of the movie involving James Caan’s character, but the cutaways and flashbacks felt overly expository and out of place, and not nearly enough time was dedicated to how the “haunting” was impacting him. Instead, we get to watch the asshole kids, whose lack of chemistry doesn’t really work to get me invested. Similarly, without any warmth to anything, I can't really care about the moral ambiguity of the story. Everyone is awful, no one is worth caring about, and none of the ideas are really fleshed out enough, in spite of it looking good and having some good performances (Keir Gilchrist is good at playing the same character he plays in most things).

Rating: 3/10