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Set in summer on a beautiful lake resort at North Carolina, Nick plays Doug, a young man who’s about to go to college. His peaceful life gets ruffled when a very rich investment banker (Dermot Mulroney) moves into the house next to theirs, with his young and sexy wife, Lena (Isabel Lucas.) Nick gets attracted to her and she’s practically seducing him, so it doesn’t come as a surprise when they are soon having a sizzling illicit affair.
Then Lena calls him up one night. She has accidentally killed her abusive husband and asks Nick’s help to get rid of the body. He takes the body into the middle of the lake and makes it appear he perished in an accident. Soon, a nosey insurance investigator comes along to investigate if the banker’s death is really an accident as Lena claims or is there something fishy about the whole thing since Lena is entitled to profit big time from her husband’s death with his hefty insurance policy.
Nick soon finds himself in the middle of a maelstrom, getting more what he bargained for as pieces of evidence soon pile up implicating him in the murder. There’s a shocking twist in the ending ala-“The Rich Man’s Daughter” that you might not see coming but in the end, Nick should have listened to the film’s cautionary title for him to have led a more peaceful life.
The film does work as a thriller and it succeeds in holding our interest, mainly because we somehow sympathize with the character Nick is playing even if he had actually done something wrong. Nick acts pretty convincingly. Our problem is with his leading lady, Isabel Lucas, who doesn’t look sexy enough for us and also cannot act that persuasively. We believe the role of the seductress could have been better played by a slightly older sexy woman. Think of Jennifer Lopez in “The Boy Next Door”.
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