Bad Neighbors

We saw a preview for The Evil Next Door (2021) before something else we watched. It seemed to be our kind of thing, so we queued it up. It didn't work out quite as planned.

It starts with a drone shot of treetops, a car driving through a forest in Sweden. This shot seems to be obligatory now. The car is carrying Linus Wahlgren, his son Eddie Eriksson Dominguez, and his girlfriend Dilan Gwyn. They have bought a house together and are moving in. Wahlgren's first wife died, and he wants to make a new start with the kid and his girlfriend. She's kind to the kid, but doesn't try to be a mother to him.

The house is in a nice looking development of duplexes. But the other side of their building is run-down (maybe evil?). Dad's job keeps him out of the house for a few days at a time, and there are odd noises. Also, the kid makes friends with another child who isn't there. 

There's really not much more to say about this, because nothing much happens until the big ending. There are a lot of scenes of Gwyn walking slowly and tensely down a corridor to see what made a noise at the end. We might see a shadow run behind her, but mostly it's just very long, drawn out, tense scenes. They either end with a jump scare, or just peter out. I know that sounds like a lot of this kind of movie, but these are so drawn out it's absurd.

In the end, the boy is grabbed by the creepy-crawly and dragged to the evil next-door apartment. Dad is knocked out, and girlfriend has to chase the boy into the basement and face the monster. And when she comes face-to-face....

Our DVD stopped playing. Just spit out a few still frames and stopped, with 5-10 minutes left. Now this happened to us at the start of a DVD (Scarlet Empress), but we could skip to the next scene. We only missed a few minutes. But that wouldn't work here. 

In the end, we decided we didn't care. Ms. Spenser looked up the ending online, and it was about as lame as she expected. I guess there is a horror genre about step-mothers trying to care for kids, maybe them putting her in danger, maybe them putting her in danger, maybe you're not sure. This is sort of the simplest version of that. We didn't care for it.