I think there are two ways to approach movies that feature a mystery. The first is the puzzle box approach, where viewers sort the evidence alongside the characters, and try to “solve” the movie. Which…y’know, you can do that if you want to! It’s just that a) movies are generally meant to tell a story/elicit a series of emotions and b) you could always go to an escape room/become a cop/journey to a remote country manor.

The second way, which is my preferred direction, is by locking into the characters themselves. It’s a more emotional choice, and for me, I care about what the characters care about. As a result, I don’t dial in terribly well to super sleuths like Sherlock Holmes. If Sherlock shows up at the crime scene, takes a toot of the seven percent solution, and lays out in excruciating detail who the evildoer is and what their motivation is, why should I care? It’s not a challenge!

As a filmgoer, I empathize with characters. I also project myself on them, and if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I’m dumb as toast when it comes to puzzles, riddles, mysteries, and the like. I’d stumble around and almost certainly make things worse, and that’s a big reason I enjoyed Neighborhood Watch, a film about a conundrum and the two wildly unqualified men who take it upon themselves to solve it.

The first of the two men is Simon (Jack Quaid). He lives with his sister, DeeDee (Malin Akerman), and when we first meet him, he’s on the way to a job interview at a diner. It doesn’t go well. Partially because Simon has spent the last ten years in a psychiatric care facility. He has hallucinations, and a voice inside his head delights in telling him how worthless he is. That doesn’t even count the years of abuse he suffered at the hands of his deceased father, who lives on in Simon’s head..

The second of the two men is Ed (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Simon’s neighbor. We get the sense that Ed wanted to be a cop, but couldn’t get the gig. Instead, he’s just been fired from a security guard position at a local college. As it turns out, spraying hand sanitizer into the eyes of a student for stealing muffins is frowned upon – who knew? Ed spends his bitter days and lonely nights losing money at online poker and pretending the increasingly concerned phone calls from his doctor don’t matter.

Things get bad when Simon witnesses an attack. He sees a man yelling at a young woman, hitting her, throwing her in the back of a van and peeling off. Simon has the presence of mind to get the license plate number, but another presence sneers at him, and tells him he can’t help the young woman. I won’t say the voice is right, but I will say that when Simon reports the incident to the police, Detective Glover (Cecile Cubilo) doesn’t exactly treat him as a reliable witness.

Maybe Simon’s perceptions aren’t reliable? That may be, but a cold reality nags at him. Since the cops won’t take him seriously, Simon knocks on Ed’s door and begs for help. Initially, Ed wants nothing to do with the young man. Yet in some ways, Ed had the making of a good cop. Maybe Simon got the license plate number wrong? Maybe he can point him in the right direction? The two begin a shaggy investigation, and quickly get in over their heads.

As I write this, I have to express to you my surprise at learning director Duncan Skiles also directed the bleak, minimalistic serial killer drama The Clovehitch Killer. That film is chilly, but here Skiles uses his gift for minimalism to create a feeling of wounded humanism with Neighborhood Watch. While the film is set in Homewood, Alabama, it really could be set in any small American city that’s stretched too thin for too long. To clarify, Skiles’ world doesn’t share the depraved apathy of David Fincher’s Seven. Instead, it’s filled with mostly good people who are overwhelmed, yet eventually will do the right thing.* It’s a movie dedicated to being anti-flashy. In a lesser film, a scene where Simon and Ed are menaced by local gangsters would be energetic, hyperviolent, and gleefully profane. Here, even the crooks are exhausted, and the thug bashing up Ed’s car seems like he’d rather settle down with a beer.  

The screenplay by Sean Farley enhances that aesthetic commitment. We see that Simon probably hasn’t been back home long, and I think the film implies that he’s home due to budget cuts rather than a therapeutic breakthrough. He’s abandoned by a barely functional system, and the script treats his mental illness with decency. The same goes for Ed’s character, as an inferior script would treat him simply as a toxic joke. Instead, he’s portrayed as someone, due to a combination of bad choices and bad luck, who watched his dreams pass him by. The plotting is just as strong as the characterization. Farley’s mystery isn’t a twisty conundrum where the characters make Holmesian deductive leaps. It’s actually all pretty seedy, but the script shows us the process of two intelligent and flawed men without investigative training doing their best to figure it out. That’s a smart move, because it sets up Simon and Ed as underdogs who simply want to do the right thing.

That underdog aspect is the not-so-secret weapon in the film’s arsenal, the performances and specifically the chemistry between Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jack Quaid. Morgan has made a career out of playing manly men, and he knows the parameters of those characters so well that he can go in different directions while still making it believable.** As Ed, he begins as a past-his-prime alpha male. His uneasy partnership with Simon unlocks a dormant compassion, and Morgan teases it out slowly. Quaid has the flashier role, and I appreciate that he took it. He’s made a career out of either playing nervous dweebs or gimlet-eyed maniacs. Here, his Simon drags the two hundred pound boulder of mental illness through the majority of the film. A plot point concerns Simon’s inability to make sustained eye contact with others, and Quaid shows us that Simon expends so much energy simply maintaining himself that the social niceties are enormously difficult. 

I recall an interview with Rian Johnson where he spoke about his love of whodunits, particularly old TV mystery series like Columbo. I wonder what he’d think of Neighborhood Watch, and a mystery investigated by two very mismatched partners. For me, the film’s low key charm and unfussy direction makes it an understated hit.

*Which feels like an apt comparison to the current state of America. 

**One of his best and most underseen performances is in Desierto, where Morgan plays an unhinged vigilante hunting migrant workers crossing the border. 

Tim Brennan Movie Critic

Tim has been alarmingly enthusiastic about movies ever since childhood. He grew up in Boulder and, foolishly, left Colorado to study Communications in Washington State. Making matters worse, he moved to Connecticut after meeting his too-good-for-him wife. Drawn by the Rockies and a mild climate, he triumphantly returned and settled down back in Boulder County. He's written numerous screenplays, loves hiking, and embarrassed himself in front of Samuel L. Jackson. True story.