I Watch Films: Neighbourhood Watch (2025)

 

Neighborhood Watch (2025)

Simon was institutionalised for ten years, can’t find a job, has difficulty keeping eye contact, occasionally hallucinates his father telling him he can’t do anything. He lives with his sister DeeDee who works in a salon while taking nursing classes; money is more than tight and she needs Simon to contribute.

Their next door neighbour is Ed, retired university campus head of security, who keeps interfering with his replacement, and who spends too much money on gambling. When Simon spots a woman being beaten and forced into a van, he can’t make out the face of the man who did it and his father’s voice tells him he’s hallucinating. He tells a police detective, but the car registration number is for one out of state, and when she looks up his mental illness history she dismisses him.

Simon in desperation turns to Ed, who has been ordered off campus and been cut off from his online gambling, so decides to help out of boredom. He knows that number plates often get misread, but he can’t afford it online and their attempt to get the driving license people to tell them goes wrong, with Simon having a panic attack and it getting almost violent. This gets reported to the police, the detective Simon talked to eventually picking it up.

Based on the description Ed thinks the woman might be a sex worker so they go to question some; this gets his car damaged by the man who runs them. Ed admits he thought Simon was hallucinating, and Simon leaves him, but they rejoin. Along the way when Simon explains about his situation and complains about Ed giving him nicknames based on his disabilities, Ed makes allowances, and attempts to help him. In the meantime Ed blackmails his replacement to get a colleague in the traffic police to run the possible plates.

They track them down, eventually ending up at Kurt’s scrap yard. There they find a car matching the description, with the plates removed, which Ed thinks means they’ve been stolen. Simon thinks he hears someone screaming for help, but Ed doesn’t, he’s hallucinating. They go home, at the end of their way for now.

Simon argues with DeeDee, he complains that she left him with their father, that she left him in the institution. She left because she was only eighteen, she also couldn’t stand up to their father, she’s doing the best she can. She goes to her night shift at the salon. The two of them having made too much of a fuss about the kidnapping, the guy who Simon saw attacks Ed at home. Simon sees this and intervenes, after some fighting Simon accidentally shoots him dead. They get his phone and discover there are only two numbers, one of which is Kurt’s. Ed and Simon go to the salon to have DeeDee patch up Ed’s wounds; the police come but they escape on the bus.

Heading back to the scrap yard, they confront Kurt who denies everything. Simon recognises the clock safe that is the same as Ed’s and within they find several passports. Kurt confesses and they leave him tied up for the police, heading for the house he tells them about. Simon has a panic attack, but Ed is able to help him, having him concentrate on the clicking of a pen, so that they can enter the house and meet the final confrontation of the film.

The low level of our thriller heroes – unemployable mentally ill man and retired security guard who is dangerously bored – combined with the genuine empathy they eventually display for each other is a highlight of this film. How difficult it is to get the authorities with the actual resources, and the danger and difficulty in doing it as a private citizen, is another. The two are genuinely not good at this (Ed moderately competent, gets close enough to draw out the villain) and they continually struggle with just one sleazy criminal at a time. What if crime was dangerous and hard to deal with?

Watch This: Heartwarming and also grim thriller in medium sized American city
Don’t Watch This: Mentally ill and addicted people try to find justice, discover grim painful truths