by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Lifetime’s
last “premiere” on April 8 was A Neighbor’s Deception, also known as Next Door, and this time it was a triumph of direction
(Devon Downs and Kenny Gage have a co-director credit but, judging from their
imdb.com pages, it’s Downs who was probably the lead director — the only other
film that credits them both is called Cynthia and on that one Downs is listed as director and
Gage as producer) over script and overall production. The film begins with a
long Gothic-horror scene in which a woman is being stalked in a house by an
unseen assailant; she hides under the bed while her would-be killer is circling
around the bedroom waiting for her to emerge, and when the assailant leaves the
room she makes a break for it — only to be caught at the foot of the stairs,
and … Then the film cuts to the good-guy protagonists, young couple Michael
(Adam Mayfield) and Chloe (Ashley Bell, top-billed) Anderson, who are just
moving into a new house and encounter their next-door neighbors, Gerald (Tom
Amandes) and Cheryl (Isabella Hoffman) Dixon. Michael is an incredibly busy
attorney, which means he works a lot of late nights — much to his wife’s
understandable displeasure — and for once he’s played by an actor who’s stocky
and dark-haired, and while not drop-dead gorgeous is quite a bit sexier than
the tall, lanky, sandy-haired and rather blank-looking guys who are Lifetime’s
usual “type” as the good-guy husbands. Apparently the two have been on the
rocks as a couple since they were unable, after years of trying, to have
children, and the last failure (we assume she had a miscarriage, though writer
Adam Rockoff doesn’t specify that) propelled her into a nervous breakdown from
which she’s only starting to recover — I guess moving out of the city and into
the suburbs was supposed to ease her emotionally and help her recover.
Gerald
turns out to be a retired psychotherapist who mostly does research now but
still likes to see patients privately in his home; he offers to treat Chloe but
we suspect, based on the way we see him looking at her when both couples have
dinner together, that he’s really after her sexually. Of course Chloe gets
suspicious of him and starts investigating his past, especially after she gets
a series of anonymous phone calls while she’s out jogging in the country (she
jogs at all hours of the day and night and we start to wonder if she has any
social life or ever does anything away from home other than jogging). The stranger
who keeps calling her turns out to be James Rooker (Ben Whalen), whose wife
Caroline (Marissa Labog) was a patient of Gerald’s years before until he
seduced her and she, too, mysteriously disappeared; James is convinced Gerald
killed his wife and wants Chloe to prove it. Gerald had told Chloe he did both
his undergraduate and graduate work at Middlesex University, but she finds out
he never finished there: he was a graduate student and a teaching assistant
when he seduced one of his pupils, who mysteriously disappeared just before the
college hearing at which she was supposed to testify against him. She and
Michael eventually learn that his family was from Bakersfield — Michael
casually jokes about him being “Norman Bates from Bakersfield,” which freaks
him out (and it surprised me, too, because my impression was that Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho actually
took place in Arizona) — when Chloe sneaks into Gerald’s house and finds a
banker’s box of papers which gives her the clue as to where he came from
originally. (There’s another nice long, largely silent suspense scene in which
Chloe drops the banker’s box — crushing one of its corners — while Gerald is on
his way home and arrives back while she’s still there: directors Downs and Gage
shoot this in a way that deliberately and vividly evokes the film’s sinister
opening.)
Chloe visits an old woman who was a friend of Gerald’s family in
Bakersfield and learns from her that Gerald was not an only child, as he claimed; instead he had a
sister named Cheryl and either Cheryl alone or the two of them together burned
down their family’s house and killed their parents. Chloe realizes that the
woman she’s been led to believe was Gerald’s wife was in fact his sister (an
interesting inversion of the plot gimmick in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The
Hound of the Baskervilles in
which the villain’s wife poses as his sister because, as Sherlock Holmes
explains, “she could be more useful to him in the character of a free woman”),
and ever since he signed her out of the mental institution she was incarcerated
in after she burned down their parents’ home and killed them, she’s been
knocking off anyone who threatened to expose him — and he, in turn, has been
shielding and protecting her from the consequences of her actions. The film has
an action climax in which the Andersons realize that Cheryl is the real killer,
she tries to knock them off, they fight back and she dies — but in one of those
annoying tag sequences they like so much, they depict Gerald as getting away
with it and seeing yet another woman patient he’ll presumably try first to
seduce and then to kill. A Neighbor’s Deception isn’t much of a movie, and the big “surprise”
reveal at the end isn’t that much of a surprise (especially with the Psycho reference to clue us in — though I was thinking
Rockoff was going for an even closer Psycho parallel in which Gerard would be committing
murders under the psychotic delusion that he was his late mother), though Tom
Amandes (about the only actor here I’ve heard of before) delivers a finely
honed performance as Gerald — but it’s saved by Downs’ and Gage’s atmospheric
neo-Gothic direction and the overall sense of menace they’re able to create
even with a pretty bland, by-the-numbers thriller script.
