The Neighbor (2018)

The new couple who moves in next door to technical writer Mike and his wife is everything Mike and his wife are not - young, sexy, fun and regularly doing it - and you just know this is going to be one of those artless updates of the Rear Window suburban thriller where the picture-perfect neighbours end up being psychopathic swingers, aliens or child kidnappers, except from the get-go these tired genre conventions are eschewed for top-notch acting (especially from lead William Fichtner), a plot that on multiple occasions defies expectations, a judicious, unhurried pace - there's no rush here to thrill or shock - and not only does it turn out that The Neighbor is a sensible, slow-burn drama but it is one that raises food-for-thought about how and when we should intervene in the affairs of others and whether this would be for the right or more self-serving reasons.

★★★☆☆

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Kidnap (2017)

The fact she is a divorcee, has a litigious ex, and is a waitress who grapples for the movie's first fifteen minutes with rude or fickle or impatient customers is all extraneous to the sixty-minute car chase Halle Berry's Karla Dyson embarks upon after she witnesses her son's abduction: the writers haven't tried to make this dross even slightly intelligent, staging the vehicular action in a logic-free fantasy land that exists free from the constraints of time, largely free from a police presence, free from geographical constraints, and free from viewers' expectations that something interesting might happen in the end to cleverly tie it all together.

★☆☆☆☆

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Case 39 (2009)

A bit like The Bad Seed crossed with The Omen only incredibly stupid, Case 39 stars Renee Zellweger as a child welfare worker who comes very quickly to the conclusion that the child murderers and abusers she encounters over the course of her job have good reason for wanting to stuff their devil's spawn into their gas ovens, and so she starts wanting to do the same.

★☆☆☆☆

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Hush (2016)

Mia Farrow and Audrey Hepburn have both played blind women terrorised in their homes (in See No Evil and Wait Until Dark, respectively) but Hush's heroine-in-distress, Maddie, is mute and deaf...and she's a writer, and this rather hilariously means when a crossbow-wielding psychopath appears at the window of her remote cottage-in-the-woods and tells her he is going to pace about outside until the end of the movie - or until something happens, whichever comes first - she can play out in her author's mind all the possible outcomes of this scenario just like she would were she plotting one of her own novels, and it is funny how deliberately this plot device is set-up, prefaced as it is with pointed conversations at the film's outset and during an extended sequence mid-film, given Maddie only realises with this far-too-great fanfare what anyone in the audience knows very well from watching other iterations of the tired, distasteful "deafblind or mute woman-in-a-home-invasion film" (or, let's face it, any psycho slasher film ever): that she'll have to kill or be killed.

★★☆☆☆

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