Movie Review: The Neighbour #13

Erupting forth with a ditty swollen in upbeat kernels and bathed in splashes of unremitting sunshine, Australian soap Neighbours paints a cheery portrait of neighbour relations. Sure, it’s not always grinning barbeques and chuckling cork-hats, but we can always rely on swathes of merriment to claw away those doldrums. However, not all of us can live adjacent to Harold Bishop, to be shone on by his uplifting jowls when just punched in the gut by a frustrating day. No, some of us aren’t that lucky. Look at Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith in Pacific Heights: youthful, prosperous couple, they buy a nice San Fran house, rent out the bottom apartment, but what they don’t know is that they’re going to get a tenant who is a psychopathic Michael Keaton. Talking of tenants – that Roman Polanski, he’s a wild one, caused his neighbours plenty of midnight turmoil, running around in street-corner garb, flicking a knife at all angles. And Corey Feldman in The Burbs – if I’d been there I’d have said to old man Hanks ‘forget about those eccentrics next door, it’s that dodgy boy from The Goonies who needs a good day’s fist-to-face action.’

Yasuo Inoune picks up this baton of neighbour-melodrama, exquisitely greased already by everyone from Hitchcock (Rear Window) to Henenlotter (Basketcase), and drives it straight into the realm of the psychothriller with The Neighbour #13.

Set much of the time around the sort of small apartment complex we’ve come to expect from every Japanese film not featuring samurai, this number orbits the fortunes of two of the doors on this terraced selection-box. Having just moved into the ground floor shelter of number thirteen (fairly trite, I know), the shy Juzo loves nothing more than to peacefully sit in his orange body-warmer, meticulously sifting through his boxes of belongings. Upstairs resides a young family: the father, bravado permeating every expletive lunging from his throat, the mother, sores of repressed vigour bouncing out her cleavage, and the son, his eyes shaped like the Playstation 2’s analogue joypad. Juzo gets a job at a local building site, a place where yer man from upstairs is a foreman, one who likes nothing better than to beat, tease and bully the peons placed under his tyrannical wing. Things are not looking too promising for poor Juzo and his gentle demeanour. But yet, something rumbles underneath the surface, something revelling in decadent violence.

Article Author: Aaron Fleming

Aaron Fleming is a waster and an idler - prone to pomposity - forever enchanted by the filmic, the sonic, words and the aesthetic - given to the most ludicrous appraisal of Culture's finest icons and compositions. He resides in London.

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