Netflix R-Rated A-List Thriller With Awful Rotten Tomatoes Score Finds New Fans

The Boy Next Door follows Claire Peterson (Jennifer Lopez), who has recently become estranged from her husband Garrett (John Corbett) after catching him in an affair with his secretary. Claire and her teenage son Kevin (Ian Nelson) are trying to pick up the pieces when 19-year-old Noah Sandborn (Ryan Guzman) moves into the house next door. Noah’s parents died the year before, and the teen has moved into his uncle’s house under the guise of helping his handicapped relative.

The Boy Next Door takes an interesting turn when, while Kevin is with his dad for the weekend, Claire finds herself sharing a late evening with her teenage neighbor. The two end up having a one-night tryst, which Claire immediately regrets the following morning. Noah doesn’t take the day-after rejection too well and soon reveals a side to his personality that is ruthlessly diabolical.

Noah makes it his life’s mission to make Claire pay for rejecting him. The Boy Next Door sees Noah work to drive a wedge between Kevin and Garrett while still lurking around Claire. As her rejections continue, it’s revealed to Claire that Noah secretly recorded their encounter, and he’s not going to be shy about the evidence that’s in his hands.

The Boy Next Door doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to erotic thrillers, though it does succeed in giving viewers a film that makes them cringe as much as it does thrill them. It’s not hard to determine that Claire’s little fling with the neighbor boy is going to take a hard turn south, and the film does little to stimulate the imagination as to what lengths the horrible little monster will go to in order to give the older woman that jilted him payback.

It’s a fun film but one that is predictable in nearly every way. The erotic thriller film tropes that were exhausted by Fatal Attraction, Sliver, Someone to Watch Over Me, etc., etc. can be seen playing out on the screen in The Boy Next Door as if the screenwriters used these classics as a playbook.

However, the film’s screenwriter, Barbara Curry, maintains that she was inspired to pen the script from her own past. The Boy Next Door‘s writer was a criminal defense lawyer for a decade. When she and her son moved into a new home, the boy who lived across the street made her imagine a premise where a young man went to excessive measures to destroy the fabric of his neighbor’s entire family.

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In addition, Curry was inspired by the real-life story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who was convicted in the 1990s for having a sexual and emotional relationship with one of her students.

But rather than have her screenplay revolve around a woman who is sleeping with a minor, Curry chose to raise her antagonist’s age to 19 so that no one would be able to give any legitimate defense to her main character’s stalker.

Netflix subscribers can currently stream The Boy Next Door.