The steamy Jennifer Lopez thriller you need to revisit this weekend
Jennifer Lopez has basically been doing whatever she wants genre-wise lately, and you can take one look at her latest filmography and get what we’re saying.
She spent 2024 fighting an AI threat in Atlas, a film that put her in the middle of Netflix’s blockbuster machine. Two years later, Office Romance brought her back to familiar territory, with Brett Goldstein opposite her in a raunchier take on the romantic comedy.
Sire it’s risqué, but don’t think too much because Lopez had gone much further than that. In 2015, she made The Boy Next Door, an erotic thriller built around a premise that guarantees trouble: a marriage on the ropes, a 19-year-old neighbour, one bad decision and, before long, Lopez in the middle of an obsessive mess. Netflix has added the film to its catalogue, and 11 years have done nothing to make the setup seem less outrageous.
Lopez plays Claire Peterson, a high-school literature teacher whose marriage to Garrett (played by John Corbett) is hanging by a thread after his affair. Then Noah Sandborn moves in next door. Ryan Guzman plays the teenager, who becomes friends with Claire’s son, which makes it harder for Claire to ignore.
You see where this is heading, don’t you? She ends up sleeping with him, and suddenly, we’ve got a situation. Claire wakes up to what she sees as a catastrophic lapse in judgement and this is something you can’t get rid of easily. On the contrary, Noah has a different view. He becomes possessive and starts pushing his way into Claire’s family life.
And just when you think that’s how far he can get, he enrols at her school. Not so romantic now, is it? From there, The Boy Next Door drops any pretence of remaining a steamy drama and marches into stalker-thriller territory. Noah needles Garrett and tightens his grip on Claire’s life.
Rob Cohen directed the film, which starts making sense once the sexual tension becomes a segue to threats and violence and, most importantly, obsession. Once Noah’s obsession becomes the engine of the film, The Boy Next Door is not mucking about. If you are looking for some subtle psychological drama, we’d like to stop you here; the screenplay asks you to go along with decisions that become harder to defend as the coincidences pile up.
Oh, and the critics, they absolutely disliked it, and well, so did the audience, but that did not stop this $4million budget title from making more than $52m worldwide. It could be Lopez’s star power, or it could be the sexual intrigue, but the film did decent business.
Netflix has put it within reach for you, and for 91 minutes this weekend, so watch Claire Peterson make a terrible decision and spend the rest of the movie discovering how far things can go.