Good Neighbors (2024)—You Haven’t Seen Neighbors Like These!
Oh, the joy of having new neighbors move in! Your heart fills with trepidation and excitement as you see the movers slowly fill in the once-empty house down the street. You wonder, what will they be like? Will they be nice, or perhaps be the rowdy kind that argue about stupid shit until the wee hours of the morning? Whatever they’re like, you just hope that things will work out smoothly between you two. And sometimes that’s all you can hope for, as you never know what they might be capable of doing.
Tamesha (played by L.A. Rodgers) and her husband Luke (played by Karl Kennedy-Williams) watch as the house across from theirs becomes newly-occupied. Wanting to make a good first impression, Tamesha brings over a fruit basket to welcome their new neighbors. Upon seeing them, she’s shocked that they’re a bit weird. Weird as in walking around their house completely in the nude and not seeing it as a problem. Despite this, she invites them over to dinner the next evening to which they agree. Upon arriving, the neighbors, Joseph (played by Judson Vaughan) and Mary (played by Dani Thompson), have a very awkward meeting and dinner with Tamesha and Luke. But things take a turn for the worse when Joseph and Mary suddenly attack their hosts, turning their harmless night into a fight for their lives.
To say that this film has a slow start is an understatement. I had a tough time trying to link the first 15 minutes with the entire second act. We actually open up to a young woman returning home in an apartment complex after hours, to which she’s immediately stalked by three sketchy looking guys hanging outside her building. After a tense scene of her evading her stalkers and escaping inside her apartment, she takes a bath and is drowned by an unknown person. The film then suddenly cuts to Tamesha and Luke’s story, leaving you confused as to how it all connects. While we learn her relevance toward the end of the second act, it does little to alleviate the initial confusion.
What we do experience in the second act is a buildup towards the reveal: that there’s more to Joseph and Mary that meets the eye. Now this is fine, except that it goes on for too long. Right off the bat when we meet them, you can obviously tell something is off about their behavior. And this one joke of them being weird goes on for almost the entire second act. If you wanted to hint that they’re different, the best course of action would be make them behave slightly differently than what is normal, instead of not understanding basic societal norms. That way, it intrigues the audience and keeps them guessing if Joseph and Mary are truly different or if they’re just a quirky couple.
Good Neighbors does shift into first gear by the third act. It metamorphose from a lightly uncomfortable offbeat comedy into a survival horror film. Every scene is brimming with tension as you journey with both Tamesha and Luke through the most frightening night of their lives. There were times that even made me worry about their safety, especially towards the end. However, this comes a bit little too late, as we only had 15 minutes of the film left. But what we do have not only echoes back to the horrifying elements of Jordan Peele’s Us, but succeeds where Peele’s film fails. It keeps the horror contained and tangible, as opposed to making it exist on a far larger scale and I applaud writer and director Richard Anthony Dunford’s efforts for doing so.
Despite the ironically-titled film’s slow second act and one trick humor, the claustrophobic and terrifying third act truly prevents it from sinking into obscurity. And from watching Good Neighbors, I can assure you that no matter how bad you think your current neighbors are, you could have it far worse. While this isn’t my favorite indie horror film I’ve seen, it certainly has its moments where it shows its true potential. Should you check out this movie, make sure you sit through the very end to enjoy the full experience. But be prepared: it will leave you chilled to your very bones!
