The Boy Next Door (2015)
Directed by Rob Cohen
A recently cheated on married woman falls for a younger man who has moved in next door, but their torrid affair soon takes a dangerous turn.
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36 films that influenced The Boy Next Door
What critics say influenced The Boy Next Door
Lopez is suitably gung-ho with her succession of terrified reactions, but the biggest problem is that Guzman is mostly a smirking bore, too blandly handsome and one-note to give his character the attention-must-be-paid, home-wrecking spirit of a Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction."
"The Boy Next Door" is rather obviously a gender-flipped version of "Fatal Attraction," the 1987 classic about an extramarital fling that turns into a nightmare.
The story is a gender inversion of Fatal Attraction (1987), filtered through a few recent scandals in which female high school teachers were caught fooling around with male students: the heroine (Lopez) is seduced by a charming hunk (Ryan Guzman) who's just transferred to her school, but he turns psycho on her when she rejects his subsequent advances.
1987's "Fatal Attraction," 1996's "Fear," and a whole lineage of similarly plotted "...From Hell" thrillers welcome a new descendant with "The Boy Next Door," producer Jason Blum's latest micro-budget effort from genre-centric Blumhouse Productions.
It's more a "Banal Delusion" than a "Fatal Attraction," though.
Back in 1944, "The Boy Next Door" was a popular tune sung by Judy Garland in the musical masterpiece Meet Me in St. Louis.
We've certainly come a ways since Judy Garland sang “The Boy Next Door” in Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis!
Remember an incandescent Judy Garland standing in a moonlit window in the 1944 screen musical Meet Me in St. Louis, wistfully pining for the boy next door, whom she doubts knows she even exists?
Rob Cohen’s “The Boy Next Door” is an unintentionally funny resurrection of the “Fatal Attraction” template, but it actually bears a closer resemblance to “Fear,” James Foley’s 1996 pseudo-thriller in which Mark Wahlberg, then just beginning his big-screen career, played a handsome young man who became dangerously obsessed with a sweet high-school student played by none other than Reese Witherspoon, whose resume was also pretty thin at the time.
1987's "Fatal Attraction," 1996's "Fear," and a whole lineage of similarly plotted "...From Hell" thrillers welcome a new descendant with "The Boy Next Door," producer Jason Blum's latest micro-budget effort from genre-centric Blumhouse Productions.
Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, whatever that one with Mark Wahlberg was called (it was called Fear, I’m just trying to pretend like I don’t remember it); In recent years, though, the subgenre seems to have fallen out of favor, except on Lifetime probably.
I see a bit of influence here from the British director Joanna Hogg, with the same haunted, long shots as Hogg’s 2010 film Archipelago, and a respect for drawn-out silences reminiscent of last year’s Exhibition.
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I mean, there’s an actual line of dialogue about Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz – AND THEN ITS RELEVANCE IS EXPLAINED BY A BULLISH SKATER PUNK.
I wish "The Boy Next Door" were a different, zingier sort of mediocrity, but whenever it threatens to go the full Zalman King "Two Moon Junction" route, it pulls back and behaves itself and settles for a grindingly predictable series of escalations.
The Boy Next Door is behind the times, a relic of an era where the runaway, zeitgeist-capturing success of Fatal Attraction created an entire subgenre of paranoid thrillers about how the greatest threat to a family’s survival was someone intimately close: a nanny (The Hand That Rocks The Cradle), a cop (Unlawful Entry), or, in the case of William Friedkin’s The Guardian, a sexy nanny who’s also a vengeful wood nymph.
I see a bit of influence here from the British director Joanna Hogg, with the same haunted, long shots as Hogg’s 2010 film Archipelago, and a respect for drawn-out silences reminiscent of last year’s Exhibition.
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While Curry writes her antagonist as an innocent hunk with a dark past, Guzman’s wry comments and blatantly sexual advances increase with a hilarious brand of psychotic ignorance that blends Dan Stevens’ portrayal in The Guest (on a much more ineffective level) with blind, immature infatuation à la The Roommate or any other teen stalker flick.
Adam Wingard’s recent thriller “ The Guest ” transformed a similar premise into something brilliant, but “The Boy Next Door” — directed by Hollywood veteran Rob Cohen (whose credits include the first “The Fast and the Furious,” in 2001) — is more cracked than inspired.
Noah’s image of himself as a romantic “hero,” combined with his dirty white T-shirt, suggests an oblique critique of the Ryan Gosling desperado mystique in “The Notebook” and “Drive.”