Sous les yeux d'un intrus

The title is a dead giveaway, obviously this guy is anything but the perfect tenant, in fact he is a psychopath hellbent on revenge. The film begins with a nine year old boy witnessing his father's suicide. Fast forward and it soon becomes clear why the old man took his own life, and what his son wants. The plot is fairly straightforward but it does get a bit complicated until we realise his sister is working with him undercover in a manner of speaking. After locating the woman they hold responsible for Daddy topping himself, their plan is to murder her father, disguising his death as a heart attack, fleece her of the life insurance money, and then, well, you know what is supposed to come next.

The best laid plans of mice and psychos don't always go like clockwork, and this one has a few problems to contend with en route, including a crazy girlfriend who turns up unannounced making a scene, and his sister not having the stomach to go through with their plan, in reality his plan.

"The Perfect Tenant" isn't a bad film, but bad guy Maxwell Caulfield is so creepy as Danny you have to wonder if any woman in her right mind would let him through the front door, much less rent him an apartment.

i have to admit i'm not a real fan of thriller movies or any movie with violence (but i liked Silence of the Lambs!)...I'm mostly into romance movies like When Harry met Sally, etc. But I really like Maxwell Caulfield (I don't care what anybody says, he was good in Grease 2!) and Linda Purl is always good and so pretty to look at (rememebr her on Happy Days?) So I rented Perfect Tenant and I really enjoyed it. Maxwell is so bad. I mean this in a good way. He's a bad guy. HE's really creepy and sinister. I watched the movie alone and had to make sure my doors were locked. Maybe I'm just paranoid, who knows. But I liked this movie and recommend it!

Jessica Michaels (Linda Purl) rents her guesthouse to Daniel Winters (Maxwell Caulfield), unaware that he is is the son of the school teacher who molested her as a child. Daniel has been in a psychiatric institution (the reason for his commitment and his method of release are unexplained) and is set on avenging the father that hanged himself before he could be charged.

As an associate producer, Purl possibly influences director Doug Campbell in giving her two slow motion admiration shots - Daniel's first look at her, and her memory as she passe her former school in a car. Purl lends her strong presence and has enough technique to put a spin on the ordinary lines she is given. In one scene Daniel hugs her and the combination of neuroses says more than anything else that Campbell can muster.

The teleplay by Jim Vines, M Todd Bonin and Campbell, based on a story by Mark Castaldo, is lightweight, though it does have 2 funny lines. When Jessica sees that Daniel's book collection is stamped with the name of the psychiatric institution, her daughter quips `I hear it's not easy to turn pages in a straitjacket', and fellow former inmate Rachel (Tracy Nelson) says to Daniel after he tries to strangle her `I know this is only a temporary situation for us'. The appearance of Daniel's sister in the narrative prefigures the conclusion, though his one controlling way of treating her sets up an expectation which is not fulfilled.

Campbell seems more interested in creating a horror movie than a psychological study. He dwells sadistically on Daniel's killing of the former tenant and attack on Rachel, and uses an appropriately unsubtle music score by Richard Bowers. In spite of Nelson's quirkiness being under-used, Campbell does defy expectations with her entrance in the way she uses Daniel's gun, gets a laugh from the cartoon chase Daniel has with someone tracking him, and provides a cut from the boy seeing his hanged father to the boy's eyes becoming Daniel's in close-up. Caulfield may not be convincing as a traumatised person, even given he may have been released because he is thought to be better or at least on medication. Presumably he is cast because of his fading pretty boy looks, though Campbell does allows him to parody Purl's anguish in the climax.

Jessica, a working mother and landlady has got to be the most dumbest character I've seen in a film. She took on a new tenant without checking him and then dropped her daughter into trouble by informing this evil tenant what she heard. This woman and her moron father ignored the warning alarms that tenant was giving off. Only the daughter grew suspicious but her mother wouldn't believe it. A silly and predictable film. Also it annoys me that Hollywood thinks mental illness is evil and that evil runs in the family.

"The Perfect Tenant" is a taut, well-constructed little TV thriller with Maxwell Caufield slipping once again into the role of a steely psychopath. Blue-eyed, impossibly photogenic Caufield makes for such an unexpected villain that you can't help but delight in all the havoc he wreaks. There's some genuinely nasty stuff here that wouldn't make it into a similar production today: we get a forced potassium chloride injection, a staged recreation of a Christmas suicide, and some pretty intense trauma flashbacks. I was surprised several times by the approach this film took: it packs up enough fake-outs and feints to keep any made-for-TV thriller addict satisfied.

I appreciated that all the major twists were largely out of the way by the halfway point, allowing us to revel in the mayhem rather than waiting for a big reveal. "The Perfect Tenant" is solid stuff, although one would be advised to check out Caufield in the terrific "Mind Games" first. That movie also features him as a family-disrupting psychopath, but with more of a darkly subversive bent.