Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
A warning to all those preparing to line up and see THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. This film does not feature Elisha Cuthbert in the story of a former porn star who moves in next door to a horny high school kid. More specifically, JACK KETCHUM'S THE GIRL NEXT DOOR is a relentless and extremely powerful effort that walks that razor-fine line between cautionary tale and exploitation masterpiece.
The reason I choose to see it as a haunting profile of brutality is the staggeringly fine performance by Blanche Baker as Aunt Ruth, a monster who doesn't need oversize weapons or a mask to be scary. She wields a cigarette, dons a housecoat, and travels with a small army of devoted and easily influenced children. These are all the tools she need to make her horrific.
In Chicago, the film will launch what is hoped to be a series of impressive midnight programs at the legendary Wilmette Theatre, just outside the Chicago city limits. And what a kick-off offering! For a while now, I've been aware of Jack Ketchum's terrifying novel about Megan (Blythe Auffarth, playing about 15 or 16 years old) who is held captive in a basement, tortured, and otherwise abused by her aunt and cousins over the course of several days back in the late 1950s. Based on true events, the story actually tells the tale of 12-year-old David Moran (Daniel Manche), the family's next-door neighbor and the only one brave enough to try and save Megan, or at least ease her suffering. What begins as simple teasing turns into outright verbal insults, beatings, and eventually escalates into humiliation, torture, and sexual abuse.
If this plot sounds somewhat familiar, there has been a film floating around the festival circuit this year called AN AMERICAN CRIME (starring Ellen Page and Katherine Keener) that is based on the same events. I haven't seen that movie yet, but I'm absolutely curious just from the quality of the cast. But someone, featuring a group of relative unknowns in THE GIRL NEXT DOOR makes all of these horrors seem more real and more terrible.
You may find it difficult to believe, but director Gregory M. Wilson tells this story with a great deal of restraint and compassion. He allows the events to play out in a manner that avoids most of the salacious details in favor of examining his characters (both good and bad). His examination of Aunt Ruth is fascinating, as he show us how she uses her warped sense of morality to slowly ramp up the abuse inflicted on Megan and her handicapped younger sister Susan. T
aken out of context, these scenes may seem to give us torture for torture's sake. But Wilson never forgets that part of the reason these crimes went on for so long without being noticed or reported was the times. People in the 1950s couldn't even fathom these sorts of things happening in their quiet suburban community.
HAL KETCHUM'S THE GIRL NEXT DOOR miraculously received an R rating because the ratings board somehow bought the cautionary tale aspect of the story. I'm not saying that Wilson and his crew pulled a fast one on the MPAA, but I've seen far less awful things on film that had to be trimmed to get a releasable rating. The board even declared that the movie “could help make a positive change for our culture.”
I guess that's true. The film is unflinching in what it shows, but it also reveals that even those boys who did not partake in the abuse, watched out of fear or shock or both. It would seem that Wilson decided that if he was going to tell this story, he wasn't going to blink or let us look away. There isn't much to hold onto here that allows you to look favorably on the ways of humanity, but THE GIRL NEXT DOOR isn't going for uplifting.
I firmly believe the mission here is to reveal the ugly side of human behavior in the hopes that someone who suspects such events are going on today might act sooner. Perhaps I'm fooling myself, but maybe I need a pinch of hope after viewing this dark and disturbing work.
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