The Neighbor Who Saw Too Much (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie Lifetime showed right after A Neighbor’s Vendetta, The Neighbor Who Saw Too Much, was a 2024 “premiere” and was a good deal better, though its quality was only relative. It had a quite good central performance by the young actress in the lead, Sage Moore, who’s billed on her imdb.com page as both Queer and Black; the latter is obvious on screen but we have to take the former on faith because in this film, at least, her character is strictly heterosexual. She’s playing Hayley Robinson, younger sister of Diane Robinson (Kia Dorsey), who’s taken over custody of Hayley because their mom has just died of cancer and their dad died some years before. Diane works as a flight attendant and when she’s out of town on an international flight, Hayley invites her school friends, including her “bestie” Chrissy (Kyla Nova), over for a secret party. The moment I saw red plastic Dixie cups at the party I feared for the worst, and indeed the worst happens when a nosy neighbor calls the police and Hayley’s party gets busted for all the illegal drinking that’s going on. Diane comes back and announces that she’s going to cut back her work schedule and do regional flights only, even though that will mean a nose-dive in her income, because she doesn’t trust Hayley and doesn’t want to leave her alone that long. She also installs a GPS tracker on Hayley’s cell phone and grounds her, telling her she’s allowed to be at home and at school but nowhere else.

Hayley relieves her boredom by spying on their drop-dead gorgeous neighbor, Jason Parker (Devante Winfrey; his imdb.com page doesn’t mention any connection with Oprah, but he’s the sort of performer who lets his pecs do his acting for him), whom she suspects is a murderer because one night she sees him bring home a blonde white woman named Layla Taylor. Hayley spies from her home as Jason takes Layla to her bedroom, she starts screaming as if her life is in danger, and then there’s an ominous silence and Hayley is convinced that Jason murdered Layla. She’s even more convinced of that when a local TV news show carries a story about Layla’s disappearance and she recognizes the photo in the story as the girl Jason brought home that night. From then on the film turns into a clever reworking of The Window, the 1949 film in which a child (Bobby Driscoll) becomes convinced that a neighbor couple (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman) murdered a sailor they lured to their apartment with the apparent intent of rolling him for his bankroll, and of Rear Window (with Raymond Burr as the killer a home-bound man, played by James Stewart, exposes) as well. Hayley enlists her friend Chrissy to be her driver because Chrissy has a car and Hayley doesn’t, and the two get into all kinds of difficult scrapes from Hayley’s determination to expose Jason as not only a killer, but a serial killer. Hayley’s antics include asking Chrissy to flirt with Jason so Hayley can sneak into his house, grab his keys and open the ominous-looking shed in his backyard, which turns out to contain a collection of postcards from various cities, each with a woman’s kiss in lipstick on the back (only the “lipstick” is really blood he drained from their bodies and used to make a print of their lips on the card) and each dated with the date in which a woman went missing in that city.

Later Hayley hides in the back of Jason’s red pickup truck convinced that he’s got Layla’s body in there, only the “body” turns out to be a mannequin and Jason tells the police it’s a CPR dummy he uses in trainings he teaches. Hayley also starts a fire outside Jason’s home just as he’s taken a woman named Samantha home with him, and the police and fire departments cause such a commotion that Samantha bails and thus, unbeknownst to her, avoids becoming Jason’s latest victim. Though Diane is disgusted when Hayley returns home in the custody of police, and an officious woman from the county’s child protective services department threatens to take Hayley away from Diane and put her in a group home until she’s 18, ultimately Hayley deduces that Jason is the notorious “Kiss of Death Killer.” There’s a final scene in which Jason and Hayley confront each other, Jason confesses and says it all started when his parents died unexpectedly, and his first victim was the aunt who took custody of him but made no secret of the fact that she regarded him as a burden she’d just as soon be rid of. Jason threatens to murder both Hayley and Diane (whom he previously dated, non-homicidally) and make it look like one killed the other and then herself, but eventually the two women fight back and Hayley finally dispatches Jason by using a fireplace poker as a harpoon. (I’m not making this up, you know!) Directed by Kaila York from a script by Brandi Sperry, The Neighbor Who Saw Too Much is actually a pretty good thriller, though York can only do so much given the outrageous improbabilities of Sperry’s script and the frequency with which the writer switches back and forth, having Hayley act intelligently in some scenes and utterly stupidly in others!