"Julia" (Maika Monroe) and her husband "Francis" (Karl Glusman) relocate from New York to his native Romania so he can take up a job in Bucharest. She has not a word of the native language, and so is pretty much on the back foot from the start as he goes to work each day leaving her to fend for herself. It's when she is looking out of their window one evening that she thinks she spots someone staring back at her. She waves, it waves back... What's going on? Is it just a bored next door neighbour or is something more dastardly afoot? Things become more sister for her when, returning home one night with her husband, she learns of the gruesome murder of a young woman nearby. Chloe Okuno does a decent job at creating and sustaining a certain sense of menace here. It's added by a decent script and a solid effort from Monroe as the increasingly paranoid woman who may be in great danger, or who may just have a very vivid imagination! I wasn't mad on the ending - it very nearly worked but I felt it hadn't quite the courage of what would have been a far more fitting conviction. It's not a great film, no - but it uses our imagination to do much of the work here and at times is really quite effective and certainly it is a bit different from a psychological perspective.
