Vague Visages’ Two Neighbors review contains minor spoilers. Ondine Viñao’s 2025 movie features Anya Chalotra, Chloe Cherry and Ralph Ineson. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

The majority of Ondine Viñao’s Two Neighbors takes place at a party. Mr. Peterson (William Hope) hosts the social gathering, his towering manor home is the venue and the guest list is comprised of other fabulously wealthy folks, save for a pair of working-class interlopers — a new hire of Mr. Peterson’s named Mark (Joseph Millson) and his daughter, Becky (Anya Chalotra). The setup promises a night of luxurious debauchery, and a film that should slide neatly into the Eat the Rich canon of recent years. Sadly, Two Neighbors turns out to be one of those parties where the people don’t really mix and the event seems to drag on forever. Then, when it’s over, you’re not really sure why you bothered going in the first place.  

When a social event goes awry, it’s natural to blame the hosts, and the Petersons are a significant part of why Two Neighbors doesn’t work. The family is made up of Mr. Peterson himself, his pill-popping wife (Zoe Telford as Sylvia) and their two adult children — Stacy (Chloe Cherry), a Paris Hilton-esque Barbie doll who dreams of becoming an underwear tycoon, and Sebastian (Jake Simmance), an odious princeling with Big Reddit Energy. So, there’s the domineering patriarch, his thot daughter and a failson… the Petersons represent all the figures of classic tales about familial wealth. 

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Two Neighbors’ problem isn’t the unpleasant characters, but rather that they never really do or say anything particularly interesting. Sylvia flirts with Mark, while Sebastian makes awkward advances at his daughter. Stacy mopes around and complains about things, while her father takes his buddies out on a late-night hunting trip. Unfortunately, a shocking incident or disgusting reveal never comes. The focal family doesn’t even offer a nuanced portrait of the upper crust or an entertaining caricature of it. And when it comes to the on-screen elites, the Petersons are distinctly second-class — they simply wouldn’t get a seat at the table with the likes of the Roys from HBO’s Succession (2018-23).

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Aside from Two Neighbors’ characters feeling unfortunately iterative, the cast also seems deeply out-of-sync when it comes to their performance tones. For example, Stacy and Sebastian are played as pure cartoons, as the former’s face contorts into a permanent sneer, à laDraco Malfoy from the Harry Potter movie franchise (2001-11), while the latter delivers each line in a torturous Valley Girl drawl. And so this jars with the much more muted turns given by Chalotra. It’s tempting to read this schism as an intentional way of separating the grotesque rich from the real people, but that interpretation doesn’t really hold. As a bleach-blonde rich kid named Chad, Taz Skylar gives one of the film’s strongest performances, playing his character with an oily charm that never strays into parody.

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Mark doesn’t look so great by the end of the night in Two Neighbors, having been pressured into taking part in a ketamine-fueled night hunt, but the actor playing him comes out of it all pretty well. Millson exudes discomfort and an unctuous eagerness to please, yet viewers can always see shades of the warm, confident man that Mark is when not surrounded by millionaires. He’s a markedly different person in the moments alone with Becky versus those at the party, and the transition always feels entirely believable.

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In Two Neighbors, Chalotra is a reasonably intriguing presence, wandering through a party with a mixture of amusement and disdain. But although Viñao focuses heavily on Becky, the director doesn’t offer a true sense of the protagonist’s wants and needs, which is ironic given a second-half supernatural twist.

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Evening entertainment in Two Neighbors is provided by a gravel-voiced illusionist known simply as “The Genie” (a typically menacing Ralph Ineson). Viñao quickly reveals that the character isn’t just there to make things disappear, but to showcase a new charity project of Mr. Peterson’s which will fulfill the deepest desires of a few lucky applicants. It turns out that Becky and Stacy are two of the winners, and that the Genie’s powers go far beyond a little sleight of hand, but — as is so often the case with magical wishes — there are some ironic side-effects.

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It’s a conceit straight out of The Twilight Zone (1959-64), one that could fuel an entire movie. However, Two Neighbors leaves this story element in the background until the final act, when Becky and Stacy get called before the Genie to make their wishes. This could have been an effective choice if it allowed the movie to pay off the deep and meaningful dynamic that had been developed between the two characters. But aside from their role as a generic representatives of the “rich” and “poor,” Becky and Stacy are just two people who happened to be at the same party and don’t like each other very much.

Ross McIndoe (@OneBigWiggle) is a freelance writer based in Glasgow. Other bylines include The Skinny, Film School Rejects and Bright Wall/Dark Room.

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