The Girl Next Door explores the horrors of extreme mental, physical, psychological and sexual child abuse in a way I've never seen before.This movie is absolutely chilling. It rattled me, and I'm not the easily rattle-able type.If you do have the stomach for it, I would definitely recommend giving this one a watch. It gets hard to watch in some scenes, but overall it's a good movie for it's subject matter. Fair warning, it is the kind of movie that you will only want to watch once.This movie stuck with me for days after I watched it, and it will stick with you too.

A bum is run over by a car. Some guy in a business suit gives him CPR for some reason and save his life somehow. The suit then tells us about pain and that nothing has been right in his life since the summer of '58. He pulls some painting out of an envelope.Now we're in 1958 when this guy, named David of course, was a kid. While at the river he runs into some older girl. They get along well. She tells him she lives with her aunt, Ruth, and sister, Susan, next door to him, after her parent died in a car accident.This was a time when doors were kept unlocked and kids just showed up in your living room. We meet some of the other teen and preteen kids in the neighborhood, mostly mean guys who don't treat girls well. They also play mean games. David and the girl, Meg, run into each other a couple more times and they start liking each other, even though David seems several years younger. David starts visiting Meg at Ruth's place. There are always a bunch of kids there. Ruth is single, and for some reason she offers these kids beer and cigarettes. She gives moralizing speeches aimed to belittle Meg and Susan. Susan is disabled, wears knee braces, and uses crutches, but that doesn't stop Ruth from violently disciplining her in front of the kids.One day Meg gives David a painting--the same painting from the intro. When Ruth finds out she interprets it as proof that Meg is a slut. After more abuse eventually Meg is bound in some torture position in the basement while Ruth and all the kids figure out how to make her suffer. They take her clothes off, start cutting her, burning her, eventually raping her. And things go downhill from there, while no one dares say a word and everyone except David participates enthusiastically.And that's what this movie is about--human inhumanity and cruelty--for the sake of cruelty. It's never clear what Ruth gains from all this, what her motivation is. Perhaps it's just the sorry need to feel superior and doing something because it can be done. I guess that's the common denominator in all torture whether in the 50s or today, allegedly for the sake of "security." More than horror torture porn, this is rather drama torture porn, it's not particularly explicit or visually gruesome. The movie is fairly slow and oddly enough the filmmakers don't bother to establish the character of Meg enough, which is why we can't really feel for her all that much until the very end.

The film adaptation of a Jack Ketchum's book is truly a masterpiece. It is a movie that maybe quite disturbing as it shows some inappropriate things. It shows human cruelty can be destructive. It seems that Jack Ketchum wrote is own story and I see it hardly based on the murder of Sylvia Likens. I don't see any connections besides a woman torturing a teen girl to death with help from her children. I see this as Jack's way to tell the events in his own creative way even though it is scary and for mature audience only.I see this movie to make people see how bad some people can be. Making wrong decisions to leave kids with other people you can't trust such as shown in American Crime that shows the true story of what happened.

I watched this a film after reading several reviews claiming it was 'very disturbing' and 'extremely difficult to watch'. Yet after sitting through the film I can not see what all the fuss was about whatsoever. Claims that this film is difficult to watch are laughable. This is mainly due to the fact that the acting of most characters was consistently poor and makes scenes feel less believable (even though it was based on a true story). In fact, the acting was often so poor (with the exception of the character Ruth in some scenes) that I have sore eyes from rolling them so many times. And there are so many stupid scenes, e.g. when a policeman bursts through the door just seconds after the main villain is killed (as per the cliché). And then in the final scene, viewers are lead to believe that one of the witnesses of the torture acquired something positive from the experience with the cliché quote of 'as meg taught me, it's what you do last that counts'. Overall, this film is a very poor attempt to make money out of a saddening true story. Poor acting, poorly made and it is not at all disturbing as a result. 5/10.