Kill the Neighbors on Prime Video. movie review

Kill the Neighbors (2024), directed by Josh Forbes, begins with a starting point that is as delirious as it is honest: A progressive rock musician trapped in creative block accidentally murders his annoying neighborwhich triggers a spiral of paranoia and comic gore that moves between hallucinatory delirium and social satire. Forbes films with a tone conscious of its own artifice, but not gratuitous; each scene seems calculated to squeeze out the visual chaos without losing the narrative pulsesomething that brings it closer to the spirit of Brain Damage or Terrifyingly Dead than to the most recent horror comedies.

The script embraces madness openly, but introduces a lucid subtext about mediocrity disguised as genius. The protagonist, played with tragicomic pathos by Ray, represents the artist trapped in his own echo, convinced that the external noise prevents him from creating, when in reality his enemy is internal. This portrait of the ego and artistic neurosis, tinged with viscera and black humor, sustains much of the film’s interest.which in other hands would have degenerated into simple self-parody.

Forbes exhibits a commendable visual ease: the practical effects, heirs of the artisanal splatter, are a gift for those nostalgic for the most eighties handmade gore. The hallucinatory passages—a mix of stop motion, grotesque makeup, and chromatic bursts—make the chaos have texture, something increasingly rare in contemporary horror. The montage alternates moments of psychedelic frenzy with others of almost theatrical absurd comedy.maintaining a precarious but effective balance between repulsion and laughter.

Alex Winter, a veteran of the absurd since Bill & Ted, brings his usual unhinged energy, and his appearance gives the ensemble a complicity with music video culture and anarchic humor. However, the film’s true merit is in how it makes nonsense work as a metaphor: the protagonist’s hell is not supernatural, but self-imposed, a loud and bloody version of imposter syndrome. In his delirium, Kill the neighbors ends up being a fierce satire of contemporary narcissism and creative self-destruction.

The tone, between grindhouse and satanic music video, may be excessive for those looking for a coherent narrative. But that is precisely where its identity lies: it is a release, an exorcization of frustrations that aims nothing more than to laugh at the horror of existing in community. As a black comedy, its greatest success is in its lack of restraint; as a horror film, in its devotion to craftsmanship.

THE BEST: Its boundless energy and return to practical gore, in the service of a fun and self-aware satire on the artistic ego.

WORST: The excessively chaotic tone and episodic structure can be tiring; Not all gags reach the same level of lucidity or rhythm

Roberto Martin.