27.
The Girl Next Door (Netflix Instant)
To be completely honest, I saw
The Girl Next Door before
The Signal, but I needed the extra time to digest
The Girl Next Door. I'm not sure that I've finished digesting it, but maybe writing about it will help me synthesize my thoughts.
Last year, I saw Lucky McKee's
Woman, which was also based on a work by Jack Ketchum. At the time, I wasn't sure how much of the film's ugliness could be laid at McKee's or Ketchum's feet. One wrote the book; the other adapted it for screen. But it was undoubtedly an ugly and cynical film that was difficult to digest.
I hadn't intended to watch
The Girl Next Door this year; after
Woman, I wasn't sure I wanted to watch any adaptations of Ketchum's works because there is not a mental bleach strong enough to wash the mental stain of that movie away. It haunts me. But Netflix lost the license to
The Girl Next Door on October 27, 2013, so I needed to decide if I wanted to watch it before it was lost, possibly for good. There was also a part of me that thought I could have a double feature with
An American Crime. While
An American Crime attempted to depict the notorious torture and murder of Sylvia Likens by Gertrude Baniszewski,
The Girl Next Door is only loosely based on that story. I have good news: after watching
The Girl Next Door,
Woman now has company in my brain. Though
The Girl Next Door is an adaptation of the story of Sylvia Likens and Gertrude Bansizewski, the actual events aren't far from what was in the film.
The Girl Next Door makes a very poor first impression. It looks cheaply made; even William Atherton can lend only so much credibility to the film. It's never quite clear how Blanche Baker's Ruth Chandler, Gertrude Baniszewski's stand-in, had such power over her accomplices in the torture and murder of Meg Loughlin, Sylvia Likens's stand-in. You can argue that Ruth was able to coerce her children to participate, but how did she control her children's friends? It feels like the film could have explored the coercive psychological power an adult authority figure can wield, but it was more focused on torturing Meg instead. We only see her provide them alcohol and cigarettes; is it because they had dehumanized Meg and treated her as an object that no one other than Meg contacted the authorities?
It also irritated me that the film is told in flashback by William Atherton's character, David, who was a boy was tangentially involved in Meg's torture and murder. He tried to rescue Meg and her sister, Susan, and he tried to tell his parents about their mistreatment. But it doesn't feel right that the story should be about how David survived this ordeal. By setting the story in David's flashback, it makes the story about how this event affected him, not how it affected the town or Susan. It doesn't help that David is a very passive figure in the film; he watches helplessly and returns again and again to watch helplessly. The film tries to build on a bittersweet tone about horrors that lay under a calm, innocent, suburban veneer,
So, for all that the film tries to do, it felt like nothing more than a fairly empty exploitation film, even though the torture and abuse happens mostly off-screen. It's funny; the film treats us as though we're mature enough to handle the idea that people would torture economically and socially vulnerable girls for fun, but it leaves most of the actual violence off-screen, unless it's perpetrated by or on David. What we do get is undeniably ugly, brutal, and hard to watch. As it was, I felt deadened to the violence against Meg about 45 minutes into the film; the rest felt like dreaded drudgery.
I compare this film to
Irreversible, which did not hesitate to show the violence in full because the violence had a purpose: it had to set the brutal tone in order to show the degenerative effects of seeking revenge.
The Girl Next Door felt emptier, as if it couldn't commit to a goal for showing the violence other than upsetting our idyllic expectations of the past.
