The Complex
2019 · 15m
Directed by Dane McCusker
A woman who has just moved into a new apartment faces escalating unwanted intrusions from her new neighbor and must decide where to draw the line.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent neighbor-invasion thriller, sure, but the premise has been done to death — and McCusker doesn't subvert it enough to justify the familiarity. You're left with a tense escalation that plays it safe when it should be making you genuinely uncomfortable in new ways.
McCusker demonstrates formal control in the pacing and spatial grammar of intrusion, situating the work within a lineage of psychological thrillers that understand restraint. The editing keeps you locked in the protagonist's perspective without ever breaking that tension, which is where the craft lives.
What elevates this beyond premise is the sound design of the intrusions themselves — each incursion gets its own sonic texture, building dread through acoustic specificity rather than plot mechanics. That single decision to make the neighbor's presence *heard* before seen, to let audio do the boundary-crossing work, is what transforms a familiar scenario into something that lands.