The story is simple: a couple moves to a new house and meets their new neighbors, the Dixons. They seem very lovely and sociable, but since this is a thriller-movie you already know that they’re not.
There are no surprises at all, here, not one. (Well, the only surprise for me was finding out in the credits that a doctor, Connie, was played by Gates McFadden. I still can’t believe it, I could not recognize her at all, I remember Beverly Crusher very well, loved her, and this woman seemed to me completely different..)
I absolutely do not recommend to watch this movie a second time. At least the first time there’s the little element of surprise, but the second time it would be extremely boring, I’m sure.
It starts with a close up shot of feet moving slowly around a house, until we see a terrified woman hiding. The intent is to throw you right away into the atmosphere of the movie, but it also seemed to me an exaggerated attempt at doing something artistic without... well, being an artist.
We see the woman reaching the door and opening it, but something keeps her inside... and we should start unravelling the mystery, but we also soon realize that there is no real mystery. At one side we have Chloe, a fragile woman recovering from a breakdown whose busy busy husband leaves her always home alone, and at the other side we have their neighbors: Gerard is a psychiatrist who immediately sees that she has problems and offers to help her for free, and his wife Cheryl who worries that people (meaning women I guess) might take advantage of him and his big big heart... it’s all there, so very clear, that these two will bring trouble to the little wife who will go looking for it.
Chloe still has panic attacks and accepts Gerard’s offer to talk to him (... really? all your secrets revealed to your neighbor that you just met?? seriously??) but then James, the husband of the poor woman we saw at the beginning of the movie, calls her and plants in her suspicious about Gerard, and she starts investigating on her own.. I mean, she felt confident in him enough to be his patient and yet she immediately believes that there might be something suspicious in him?? This shows that she’s either really stupid or that she’d go far for something free...
She goes to his old school, she talks to a doctor that was a teacher back then, and even sneaks into his house when the Dixons are out to spy around... honestly at this point in the story it seemed a bit too far... after all she didn’t know that James had been murdered, what reason did she have to be that suspicious? Simply because a strange man approached saying that he was a murderer? Anyway, she finds an address and investigating further she learns that Cheryl is Gerard’s crazy sister so she storms into her husband’s office to tell him that it wasn’t Gerard, it was his sister Cheryl the crazy murderer!! Of course he thinks she’s crazy.
She goes home and Cheryl attacks her but doesn’t kill her right away. Chloe wakes up tied to a chair and talks to Gerard and understands that he knows about Cheryl and he’s part of it, but it looks like this time Gerard doesn’t want Cheryl to kill her, he’d like to let her go but Cheryl thinks otherwise. Chloe’s husband comes home to apologize and doesn’t find her but sees signs of struggle and gets worried. He finds her almost dead in the chair and rushes to free her, and when Cheryl attacks him all screaming he turns around with a knife in his hand and she gets stabbed. Now, let me understand, were they still in Chloe’s home and nobody heard him entering or did he break into Gerard’s house? How come he had a big knife on his hands? Should I believe that he suddenly believed all her words and before going looking for her he went to the kitchen to get a big knife just in case??
Moving on, Chloe wakes up at the hospital: she had been beaten, almost strangled and almost suffocated and yet she was now fine, but Cheryl didn’t make it. Gerard has gone away and we see him somewhere with another woman saying the same words he told Chloe.. I guess that should be the scary ending, knowing that he’s out there ready to start it all over again, but that would imply that it was him doing the killing, and yet we saw that Cheryl was the one who attacked Chloe and wanted to kill her, he had tried to stop her (not very hard admittedly).
It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Chloe-Ashley Bell
Gerard-Tom Amandes
Cheryl-Isabella Hoffmann
ITA la strana vita dei miei vicini
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