Destroy All Neighbours

Watching the opening sequence of Destroy All Neighbors, one might well anticipate a classic gonzo horror experience. True, this owes something to 2015’s Curtain, but its use of music and colour and gleeful grotesquerie marks it out as something specific and totally committed. It does a good job of maintaining this mood throughout, but unfortunately fizzles out in other ways, as its narrative ideas are as scattered and messy as the body parts of some of its characters.

How much of it is intended to be real, and how much hallucination? You might well wonder, as dream logic tends to predominate despite a more sober start. If you’ve ever had a neighbour who was loud all of the time, round the clock, then you’ll appreciate the ways in which lack of sleep can start to make the real world and the imaginary difficult to distinguish. Will (Jonah Ray) is particularly sensitive to noise. He has small ear canals, so can’t wear headphones (we are told), and he’s trying to get enough mental space to complete his prog rock opus. So when new neighbour Vlad (Alex Winter) moves in next door and turns his amp up to 12, Will is not happy.

Is this reasonable? Even early on, we’re invited to question how much of Vlad’s gratuitously obnoxious behaviour is in Will’s imagination. Emily (Kiran Deol), Will’s girlfriend, reminds him that he always seems to be looking for an excuse for failing to finish his composition. She gets along fine with Vlad, but this only aggravates Will more. Over a remarkably short span of time, we watch the mild-mannered sound engineer driven into a convulsive rage in which, once he has finally overcome his fear of confrontation, the obvious answer to his problems seems to be violence. Vlad, however, is not that easy to dispose of, and Will’s situation can get much, much worse.

Helmed by prolific music video director Josh Forbes, Destroy All Neighbors knows exactly where it’s going but has no idea what to do when it gets there. A loosely constructed plot about murder, mutilation and music risks getting lost in an approach to comedy which is completely without restraint. It’s as warm-hearted as it is high-spirited, but so self-indulgent that everything else takes a back seat. Appropriate though this may be to the prog rock theme, the central ideas are simply not strong enough to support it, and it collapses under its own weight.

What will appeal to many fans regardless is the larger than life characterisation and the extensive practical effects work. Forbes never settles for subtle when ridiculous excess will do, but he knows how to pulls it off and, in places, this is wildly entertaining. The sort of film that is at its best when you’ve already knocked back several pints with your pals, Destroy All Neighbors is clumsy and incoherent but gloriously creative nonetheless – and that’s rock n’ roll.