Neighborhood Watch, 2025.
Directed by Duncan Skiles.
Starring Jack Quaid, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Åkerman, Krishna Sistla Ward, Cecile Cubiló, Nicole Cyrille, Harrison Stone, Jim Klock, Derrick Goodman Jr., Charles Arthur Berg, Creek Wilson, Visionz2turnt, Jonathan Fuller, Curtis Lyons, Leslie Sides, Melanie Jeffcoat, Griffin Hood, and Billy Culbertson.
SYNOPSIS:
When a mentally ill young man thinks he witnesses an abduction and the police refuse to believe him, he reluctantly turns to his next door neighbor—a bitter, retired security guard—to help him find the missing woman.
There is enough to director Duncan Skiles’s Neighborhood Watch to suggest that its conversations around mentally ill individuals are well-meaning. However, it also falls into that trap of uncomfortably playing beats for laughs while deploying a clichéd evil inner voice that feels exploitative more than an accurate depiction of schizophrenic auditory hallucinations and anxiety resulting from trauma. The film is also written by first-time screenwriter Sean Farley, which certainly explains the rough edges and questionable execution.
Fortunately, these filmmakers have the amusing interplay between a disheveled Jack Quaid and sardonically cranky Jeffrey Dean Morgan portraying mismatched neighbors who wind up working together searching for an abducted woman that the former witnessed from afar being shoved into a vehicle. The problem is that Simon (Jack Quaid) has a laundry list of mental conditions and can’t even get through a job interview without coming across as cuckoo and unqualified, especially whenever entering into nonsense word salad sentences brought on by intense anxiety, meaning that law enforcement doesn’t take his panicked and concerned call seriously. It stems from issues with his father. Currently, Simon is living with his nursing student sister Deedee (Malin Akerman).
That’s a solid, intriguing premise, especially for this day and age in America, when anyone who isn’t quote unquote normal is in danger of having basic human rights stripped away any day, let alone being ignored as if having mental illnesses invalidates serious concerns and reported allegations. In defense of the police station, they do try to search for the registered license number Simon wrote down, which yields plates nowhere near his location, giving them more misguided confidence in washing their hands of the situation. I also acknowledge that there is a line here for law enforcement to draw, depending on whether they believe Simon is reliable, given those conditions. It’s a dynamic worth exploring in deeper, richer detail, which makes it somewhat disappointing that the rest settles for hijinks and humor among these high stakes.
Desperate for someone to drive him around and dealing with the horror he witnessed, Simon pleads with his neighbor, Ed Deerman (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a former community college campus security guard currently without much purpose in life, to assist him. Initially disinterested but inevitably forced into tagging along, partially out of pity, Ed isn’t sure if he believes Simon but puts his knowledge to work, suggesting that maybe he got one of the numbers on the license plate wrong, such as mistaking an S for a 5. The dynamic here primarily includes condescending banter toward Simon that we are seemingly meant to laugh at, which is, again, unfortunate given that this is someone who is mentally ill. Even the following sequence, set in a DMV, sees Simon having a breakdown, accompanied by a soundtrack featuring a corny, sinister voice that is far too generic and simplistic for a movie tackling such illnesses.
The backhanded compliment here is that Jack Quaid and Jeffrey Dean Morgan are talented enough to make that chemistry work, and to make us laugh at some of the latter’s slightly insulting remarks, feeling bad about it. Ed’s heart also genuinely warms to Simon over the narrative, but it’s not enough to shake the fact that much of Neighborhood Watch comes across as a miscalculation. However, the filmmakers are smart enough to keep the mystery grounded without demeaning Simon further with ludicrous revelations that would cement him as unreliable. There is a woman to rescue, and the film smartly doesn’t try to mislead about that aspect. It’s just all too shaggy and amateurish, with questionably broad humor, only coming close to working because of its stars.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
