A car drives slowly through a living wasteland of a suburb with small oil derricks blackly nodding by every other house. The car stops at a house and the driver opens the boot to reveal two boys of about ten years old boudn and gagged. A flashback bursts to life in a golden field in complete contrast to the steel blue hell of the opening. The two boys run through the grass, playing catch with a baseball. One of them runs to the nearby forest to get the ball and doesn't come back. The other one goes in search and has his head whacked into a tree for his troubles. Then they are in the boot on the way to hell house. One of the boys, Bobby, has been left in the boot but manages to kick his way out. Getting his bearings he leaves the garage and goes into the house where he finds his friend Kevin, imprisoned in one of the rooms and shackled to the floor. There is a man downstairs who seems to be waiting for something to happen. He's watching tv and boiling the jug. There's a stopwatch on his wrist. Bobby almost gets by him. For the next eighty or so minutes there will be almost nothing but tension.
Too many twists and turns for more plot than that but if you were after a tight thriller that works well enough to keep your interest and tell an involved story with probably kless than ten minutes of dialogue then give this one a go. There are plot holes galore but I'll keep it to one. Bobby has to get rid of a lot of blood on the floor as a threat is making its way toward him. He seems to do this almost completely in minutes with a couple of tea towels. Could anyone really do anything like that? No but I couldn't care less as the pace of the action was so firmly helmed and the payoffs and underlying creepiness just took me away. Committed performances, especially by the two friends, a lean and mean aesthetic and a willingness to risk losing its audience through some bad character decisions make this one worth the time. It's not a gamechanging genre buster but it works. Oh, and watch out for the MAGA sticker. Funny.
The Boy Behind the Door is on Shudder.
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