‘The Good Neighbor’ Review: Sometimes Maintaining a Friendship Can Be Murder
16.06.2022 - 03:17
/ variety.com
Dennis Harvey Film CriticSticking to the thriller genre that’s been his stomping ground on both the big and small screen, Stephan Rick’s second English-language film “The Good Neighbor” is a remake of his 2011 German-language debut feature of the same title. The setting has changed (to Latvia, presumably for financing reasons), but the story remains largely untouched.
Now Luke Kleintank and Jonathan Rhys Meyers play new acquaintances whose shared complicity in an accidental death creates increasingly unsavory conflict.Competent performances and a slick veneer make this revamp go down easily enough. Still, one wishes Rick had placed more emphasis on Hitchcockian suspense, rather than trusting the slow-moving tale will hold us via plot and character complexities that really aren’t particularly evident.
American journalist David (Kleintank of the series “FBI: International” and “Man in the High Castle”) has accepted a job with the “European Press Network” in Riga in the wake of a bad relationship breakup. While he gets settled, his editor Grant (Bruce Davison) is letting him stay at a house he owns outside town.
Thus he meets next-door neighbor Robert (Rhys Meyers), who proves helpful in getting a stubborn car started. In thanks, David invites the Latvian-British man out for a drink.
They end up at a club where the new guy meets another Brit, vivacious Janine (Ieva Florence), striking sparks enough that they exchange numbers before she pedals off home.Alas, on the tipsy drive back to their own abodes, the two men plow right into a bicyclist riding down the middle of a dark lane — one who is unmistakably Janine, and now unmistakably dead. Robert persuades stricken David there’s nothing they can do for her, and that
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