Ah, Neighbor — a horror film that dares to ask the question no one was asking: What if American Psycho had a lobotomy, hosted a house party, and forgot to invite any sense of purpose? This 2009 torture flick, written and directed by Robert A. Masciantonio, stars America Olivo as “The Girl,” a nameless, blood-splattered enigma whose primary hobbies include murder, mutilation, and dancing around suburban homes like she’s auditioning for So You Think You Can Slay.
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if your local PTA mom went on a caffeine-fueled killing spree while maintaining her Pilates routine — congratulations, you’ve found your movie.
🎬 The Plot — or at least what passes for one
We open on a suburban house that looks like it was borrowed from a mid-2000s IKEA catalog. Inside, a woman (known only as “The Girl”) whirls around to pop music, cooking breakfast for herself like a Pinterest influencer with homicidal tendencies. It’s actually a nice domestic scene — if you ignore the part where she’s keeping a couple tied to chairs upstairs like some kind of Martha Stewart of mayhem.
She pretends to be shocked at the sight of her victims, which is a little like Ted Bundy pretending to faint at his own trial — cute, but not fooling anyone. Moments later, she’s stabbing the poor husband in the chest with a faucet handle. Why a faucet handle, you ask? Because apparently knives are too mainstream for this movie’s avant-garde killer. She collects his blood in a wine glass and takes a sip like it’s a 2012 Cabernet with notes of “domestic terror.”
From there, she keeps up her murder-tour of the neighborhood: poisoning an old lady’s medication (take that, Big Pharma!) and drowning a high school girl in her bathtub after several failed electrocution attempts. By the third failed kill, you start to feel for The Girl — not emotionally, but practically. If serial murder were a job, she’d be the intern still trying to figure out how the office printer works.
Then we meet Don Carpenter, a stoner musician who looks like every guy who insists his garage band is “on the verge of blowing up.” Don lives alone in what I assume is the world’s saddest recording studio — you can almost smell the expired Taco Bell and shattered dreams. Naturally, The Girl takes an interest. Why? Who knows. Maybe she’s just really into guys who think Sublime lyrics count as poetry.
🔪 Torture, Murder, Repeat (Now in Hi-Def!)
Once Don is captured, the movie becomes a claustrophobic slog through a series of torture scenes that somehow manage to be both too graphic and mind-numbingly boring. There’s blood, screaming, and drug-induced hallucinations — and yet none of it lands with any emotional impact. You could replace the entire soundtrack with elevator music and it would feel about the same.
It’s not scary. It’s not suspenseful. It’s like watching an art student try to make a thesis film about nihilism but running out of red paint halfway through.
Don’s friends and ex-girlfriend also get captured, but the movie doesn’t bother giving them personalities, so their deaths feel less like tragedy and more like a clearance sale at the human body parts store.
Eventually, The Girl starts crying as she strangles Don — perhaps realizing mid-choke that she signed up for a movie that’s going straight to the bargain bin at Walmart. Then she poses all her corpses in the basement, as if staging an avant-garde Instagram post titled “Monday Vibes.”
And here’s where it gets truly absurd: after all the carnage, she just… walks upstairs into Don’s house party, greets the guests like she’s hosting Brunch with the Butcher, and then sashays down the street, dancing like a homicidal Mary Poppins. I half expected her to twirl into the sunset with a severed head in each hand.
The film ends with one of the “dead” bandmates waking up — blind, puking up drain cleaner, and screaming for help. That’s not a spoiler; that’s just poetic justice for anyone who made it through all 89 minutes of this fever dream.
🎭 The Characters: Nobody You’ll Miss
America Olivo’s “The Girl” is… well, she’s something. She oscillates between seductive, psychotic, and just plain bored, like a method actor who forgot which method she was using. She’s a kind of anti-hero the script desperately wants to make iconic — think Hannibal Lecter meets a hot yoga instructor — but she ends up feeling about as threatening as an unhinged Peloton instructor.
Don, our supposed protagonist, spends most of the movie screaming, hallucinating, or trying to reason with a woman who clearly skipped empathy in her high school curriculum. The rest of the cast are cannon fodder — a parade of disposable side characters whose names you’ll forget faster than you can say “torture porn fatigue.”
🎥 The Style: Cheap, Sleazy, and Weirdly Proud of It
Let’s talk aesthetics. Neighbor desperately wants to look edgy and transgressive — the kind of movie you’d find on a late-night Cinemax lineup next to Vampire Sorority Babes 4. Every shot is bathed in either neon pink or grimy shadow, giving it the distinct look of a music video for an emo band that never got signed.
The gore effects range from “convincingly gross” to “did someone just squirt ketchup on a mannequin?” It’s less Saw and more Splat. The sound design is also bizarrely inconsistent: some screams sound like they were recorded in a closet; others echo as if they’re being shouted from the next ZIP code.
The editing doesn’t help. It feels like someone put the film through a blender and hit “pulse.” You’ll be halfway through a scene and suddenly the lighting, tone, and continuity change like you accidentally sat on the remote.
🧠 The Themes: None Detected
You can sense that Masciantonio wants to say something profound about violence, gender, or suburban apathy. But what actually comes across is: “Wouldn’t it be cool if a hot chick killed people?”
If there’s any moral here, it’s buried under so much sadistic nonsense that it might as well be written in invisible ink. There’s a recurring motif of “The Girl” dancing after her murders — perhaps meant to symbolize freedom, or maybe she’s just vibing to the sounds of her own psychopathy. Either way, it’s the cinematic equivalent of watching someone do interpretive dance at a funeral.
🤡 Final Thoughts: A Bad Neighbor You’ll Want to Move Away From
Neighbor tries to be shocking, but it ends up being silly. It tries to be edgy, but it’s just mean-spirited. It tries to be deep, but it’s about as profound as a Hot Topic clearance sale.
If American Psycho is a gourmet meal of psychological horror, Neighbor is the gas station sushi version — it might technically fill you up, but you’ll regret it almost immediately.
At its best, it’s a midnight curiosity — the kind of movie you watch with friends while yelling, “Wait, did she just kill someone with a tap?” At its worst, it’s an endurance test that makes you question not just the filmmaker’s choices, but your own life decisions leading up to watching it.
Still, I’ll give it this: America Olivo is committed. She goes all in on a script that’s barely half-baked, and her performance gives this mess the faintest glimmer of unintentional camp. If there’s ever a sequel — Neighbor 2: Homeowners Association of the Damned — she deserves to at least negotiate for a better dance playlist.
Verdict: 1 out of 5 blood-filled wine glasses 🍷
Watch it only if you’re conducting research on how not to make a horror film. Or if you’ve run out of paint thinner and need something equally toxic.
