The Evil Next Door is the story of a blended family, a creepy duplex, and a demon that—much like this script—really needs to find a hobby.
On paper, this Swedish horror film sounds promising: grief, domestic tension, haunted semi-detached housing. In practice, it’s like someone watched The Conjuring, The Babadook, and a real estate commercial, threw them in a blender, and pressed “mildly spooky purée.”
Welcome to Discount Duplex of Doom™
We meet Shirin (Dilan Gwyn), who moves into a new semi-detached house with her boyfriend Fredrik and his five-year-old son Lucas, who is still dealing with the death of his mother. This is actually a solid emotional setup: new stepmom, grieving kid, unresolved tension. Great raw material for character-driven horror.
Instead, the film looks at all that juicy potential and goes, “Yeah, but what if we just did… imaginary friend + evil neighbor ghost?”
Lucas, being five and traumatized, starts asking whether dead people can come back, which is a perfectly normal question. Unfortunately, in horror cinema that’s basically a signed contract saying, “Yes, they can, and they are extremely bad at boundaries.”
Soon he starts talking about his new “friend next door.” Cute, right? Tiny problem: the other side of the house is empty and has been for years.
To recap:
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New house: ✔️
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Grieving child: ✔️
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Half-empty duplex: ✔️
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Strange noises: ✔️
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Creepy imaginary neighbor kid: ✔️
At this point, every horror fan in the world is screaming, “Move out,” while the characters are like, “Let’s just sleep on it and ignore every obvious sign of demonic infestation.”
The Plot, or: A Guided Tour of Things You’ve Already Seen
If you’ve played “Horror Movie Bingo,” The Evil Next Door clears the board in record time:
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Child talks to invisible friend.
Lucas starts chatting with someone unseen through the walls. Shirin assumes it’s a coping mechanism. Because nothing says “healthy processing” like whispering through vents to someone who doesn’t legally exist. -
Weird sounds in the night.
Shirin hears footsteps, scratching, and noises from the supposedly empty side of the house. Naturally, nobody believes her because horror law states that adults must be aggressively skeptical until the third act, regardless of how blood-curdling the evidence. -
The “You’re just stressed” boyfriend.
Fredrik spends most of the movie being That Guy: “You’re tired, Shirin. It’s just grief. And also wind. And houses creak. And demons don’t exist even though my son is now drawing actual nightmares.” -
The Terrible Secret™.
The house “holds a terrible secret” about a previous child and something malevolent that feeds on kids. Honestly, if you’ve ever walked past a horror DVD section, you could guess this entire backstory in under 45 seconds.
And through it all, Shirin does that classic horror heroine thing: she investigates alone, at night, in dim lighting, with the unwavering confidence of someone who has never seen a movie in her life.
The Monster: Slender Man’s Swedish Cousin
The entity itself is played by Troy James, a contortionist who’s genuinely great at being physically unsettling. He deserves better than being stuck in “generic kid-snatching demon who lives in the crawlspace.”
The design is oily shadow + long limbs + crouching in corners. It’s the sort of creature that would have scared you silly in 2010 on /r/creepypasta. By 2020, though, it feels like the world’s saddest jumpscare intern.
And the movie seems weirdly proud of it—like it keeps going, “Look! Dark hallway! Look! It’s standing BEHIND her! Again!” We get it. It’s tall and creepy. So is every IKEA lamp if you turn the lights off.
Shirin: Final Girl or Live-in Nanny?
Shirin could’ve been an interesting character: a woman stepping into a maternal role with a child who’s not hers, in a house haunted by the idea of lost mothers and broken families.
Instead, the film largely reduces her to:
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Babysitter
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Gaslit victim
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Demon bait
We almost get something compelling when she tries to connect with Lucas while feeling like an outsider in her own home. But every time the emotional core starts to come alive, the film slaps it aside for another round of:
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“Did you hear that?”
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“It’s just the house settling.”
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“No, seriously, did you hear that? The house just whispered my name.”
Fredrik, meanwhile, spends so much time being dismissive and absent that he feels less like a partner and more like a human version of the “low battery” beep you keep ignoring.
Scares on Repeat Mode
There are two kinds of fear in horror films:
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The kind that crawls under your skin and festers (dread, atmosphere, emotional horror)
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The kind that shrieks BOO in your face and hopes you spill your popcorn
The Evil Next Door awkwardly tries to do both and nails neither.
You get the usual:
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Creaking upstairs
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Something in the dark corner
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Closed doors mysteriously open
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Child saying, “He says he wants to play with me forever” (which should be grounds for immediate exorcism and/or U-Haul rental)
But it’s all so familiar and so telegraphed that it’s almost comforting. This is the cinematic equivalent of reheated leftovers: it technically feeds you, but you’re not savoring anything.
The House: Fixer-Upper from Hell
The duplex setup actually could have been brilliant. Shared walls, shared pipes, weird sounds traveling between spaces… that’s a perfect excuse for paranoia and ambiguity. Is it real? Is it next door? Is it in your own room?
Instead, the “empty” side of the house feels oddly underused. Yes, we get some exploration, some flickering lights, some ominous vibes. But it never becomes a truly oppressive presence. It’s just “the spooky side you shouldn’t go into,” which Shirin obviously goes into anyway, repeatedly, at night, with a flashlight, like a discount Silent Hill protagonist.
Emotional Horror? More Like Emotional Suggestion
The best horror about kids and parents doesn’t just throw a monster at the family—it uses the monster to expose what’s already broken.
Here, we have:
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A child grieving his dead mother
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A new partner who feels like an intruder
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A father who’s emotionally checked out
That should be a goldmine for tension. Instead, the movie mostly uses it as an excuse for everyone to stand around saying things like:
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“He’s been through a lot.”
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“It’s hard for him.”
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“You’re trying your best.”
Then something growls in the attic.
Imagine if the film had actually committed to the idea that the “evil next door” was as much the failure to grieve and communicate as it was a literal demon. Instead, we get a Scooby-Doo episode where the haunted house is real but the emotional stakes feel fake.
The Ending: Yes, There Is One
Without spoiling every detail, let’s just say the third act sticks to genre tradition:
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Child in mortal danger? ✔️
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Heroine venturing into the belly of the beast? ✔️
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Authority figures late, useless, or nonexistent? ✔️
Things escalate, there’s a final confrontation, and the demon gets its big moment.
Does it resolve the family’s emotional arc in a satisfying way? Not really.
Does it say anything new about grief, motherhood, or blended families? Also no.
Does it prove that Swedish horror can do just as generic a supernatural ending as any American studio? Absolutely. International cinema: truly equal at last.
Final Verdict: The Evil Next Door… And the Blandness Right Here
The Evil Next Door is not aggressively terrible. It’s well shot, competently acted, and occasionally creepy. But it’s also painfully safe, derivative, and uninterested in using its best ideas for anything more than set dressing.
If you’re new to horror and jump at shadows, it might do the trick on a rainy night.
If you’ve seen more than, say, four haunted house movies in your life, you’ve already seen a better version of this one. Probably several.
The real horror isn’t the demon in the empty half of the duplex.
It’s the realization that, in the year 2020, with all the psychological and cultural angles available, someone still thought “imaginary friend + dead mom + generic attic demon” was enough to carry an entire film.
In the end, the evil next door isn’t that scary.
The cliché next door, though? Truly unstoppable.
