DESTROY ALL NEIGHBORS - Mark Reviews Movies

Destroy All Neighbors, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 11, 2024

The poor guy just wants some peace and quiet so he can continue not finishing the rock album he has been working on for the past three years. That's this movie's setup, which sounds innocent enough, but the title Destroy All Neighbors gives one a better idea of the demented joke at its heart.

Basically, the timid William Brown (Jonah Ray Rodrigues) finds himself in a series of confrontations—none of which he wants and, more importantly, all of which result in some grisly fatality. It's a decent gag, especially since William is the sort who can barely stomach even the idea of conflict, but the screenplay by Jared Logan and Charles Pieper takes the already-twisted nature of that premise a few steps too far.

That's not necessarily in terms of the violence, which is all accidental (or, if we question the main character's mental state in the way the movie suggests we should, "accidental"), and gore, which is plentiful but comically cheap and over-the-top in ways that almost certainly are intentional. It's mostly that William's character stops making much sense as soon as the first dead body ends up in front him, because the filmmakers have a series of ideas they want to address and a consistent character at the center of this story might get in the way of accomplishing that. Instead of allowing this guy to guide the narrative, the story yanks him around in the directions the screenwriters and director Josh Forbes want to go.

The issue arises pretty quickly, almost immediately after the complex death of William's first "victim," but a little bit of setup is required to get there first. William works as a sound engineer at a recording studio, but that's only to pay his share of the rent for a cramped apartment and bills with his girlfriend Emily (Kiran Deol). During the day, William puts up with the grind of his job (Thomas Lennon plays his doormat of a boss, and Ryan Kattner plays the temperamental rock "star" who seems to have an instant vendetta against William). On his off time, he sits in front of some mixing equipment at home, putting the final touches on a progressive rock album that doesn't seem as if it will ever be finalized.

The initial conflict comes from a new neighbor, a rather and wholly unpleasant man named Vlad (Alex Winter, unrecognizable under layers of wrinkly prosthetics), who plays loud electronic music at all times of the day—or just when William is home and working. William is scared to ask the neighbor to turn down the volume, but after an embarrassingly failed attempt to knock on the wall, he finally works up the nerve. Vlad tries to make William fight him, but our man figuratively keeps his head—until Vlad ends up impaled and literally loses his.

Here's where a fairly complicated—to say the least—scenario becomes unnecessarily convoluted with a lot of contradictory ideas and psychological baggage that the filmmakers aren't nearly prepared to examine. William immediately decides he has to get rid of the body for the sole reason, apparently, that the plot would end if he doesn't immediately find the stomach to either dissolve or dismember a human corpse. Forget everything the movie has established about this character, because, now, he's basically a sociopath.

Also, he's probably suffering from some deep mental illness. It's either that or the corpses of the people he accidentally kills—a homeless man (played by Christian Calloway) and another neighbor (played by DeMorge Brown) with emotional-support pigs—actually come back to life to mock him, scold him, and ultimately give him some advice on how the finish the album. His landlord (played by Randee Heller) ends up dead, too, but that's only because William is too busy trying to dispose of the pieces of Vlad's reanimated body to help her with an electrical problem in the apartment building.

None of this is really ruining the surprise of the story, because the running joke becomes recognizably repetitive as soon as a second "victim" arrives and the actual core of it—besides the gruesome deaths—is a study of how William confronts his self-doubt. Ray Rodrigues is consistently amusing as the hapless "serial manslaughterer," but if there's any depth to be found between the overt lines of the script, it's not in his performance.

That's not his fault, of course, because Destroy All Neighbors puts the character aside in order to shock and tell the same joke over and over. Both of those wear out quickly.

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