The Boy Next Door

The Boy Next Door casts Jennifer Lopez as Claire Peterson, a newly-divorced teacher who finds herself on the receiving end of increasingly unwanted attention after engaging in a one-night stand with her 19-year-old neighbor (Ryan Guzman’s Noah Sandborn). It’s the sort of unabashedly trashy premise that’s fallen out of favor in recent years, with movies of this ilk cropping up on a pleasantly regular basis in the early ’90s (eg The Temp, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Unlawful Entry, etc, etc). And while it rarely makes it up to the level of those better-than-average efforts, The Boy Next Door nevertheless comes off as a perfectly watchable throwback that contains all of the elements that one might’ve anticipated (and hoped for) – including a (doomed) suspicious best friend and the perpetrator’s continuing efforts to undermine the protagonist’s life both at home and at work. Filmmaker Rob Cohen, working from Barbara Curry’s screenplay, isn’t quite able to sustain a consistent tone, however, and the movie boasts its fare share of decidedly underwhelming stretches – with the sporadic ineffectiveness of the deliberately-paced midsection compounded by a lack of salacious sequences. The film bounces back with a vengeance as Guzman’s character goes full psycho and begins wreaking havoc on Claire’s existence, with the narrative ultimately building to a spectacularly entertaining (and impressively violent) climactic showdown that’s as satisfying as it is ridiculous – which does, in the end, confirm The Boy Next Door‘s place as an erratic yet entertaining stalker-from-hell thriller.

*** out of ****