Starring Sydney Sweeney, Justice Smith, Ben Hardy, Natasha Liu Bordizzo and Katharine King So.
Written & Directed by Michael Mohan.
★★
This low-budget thriller now on Amazon Prime is somewhere between a Hitchcockian wannabe and a Skinemax throwback. It builds suspense slowly then it slams its foot on the gas for a psychotic convoluted Act III that defies logic while making you want to hide your eyes.
Young couple Pippa (The White Lotus' Sydney Sweeney) and Thomas (Detective Pikachu's Justice Smith) have moved into a spacious studio apartment, and they quickly notice their neighbors Seb and Julia across the street like to have sex in their kitchen, in their living room, etc., with no curtains drawn. At first it's amusing voyeurism on their part, but the more they watch, the more they see suspicious activity. Seb brings a mistress home, and Pippa is torn if she should say something to Julia, a woman she's never met in person.
They start playing with fire when they see Seb & Julia are having a Halloween party, so they put on face-hiding costumes and crash it, trying to learn more.
The build is deliberately paced, sometimes ploddingly so. Hey, more time for nude scenes if you take your time with the main plot. The big twist that gets the ball rolling for the second half is shocking, and it shows that it's not just going for genre thrills here; this movie is unafraid to go to some dark places. But as things ramp up to a rapid pace, with more danger and a couple dead bodies, the thin logic holding everything together vaporizes. There's more than one time with more than one character where I wanted to yell "Why aren't you calling the cops?!"
It has some vague morality-play messaging about overreliance on technology and some "curiosity killed the cat" finger-wagging, but I don't think I could say it's a good movie. It's not one you forget as soon as the credits roll either. I suppose I can tip my hat to it on that level, anyway.
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