Neighborhood Watch (2025) and the odd couple beautifully win the day
“I have a name. It’s not screw-loose. It’s not Section 8. Or retard. It’s Simon”
Duncan Skiles third feature length release as director (following The Last of the Great Romantics in 2014 and The Clovehitch Killer in 2018) is a true gem if you let it into your heart, cherish the driest of black comedy when it arrives and when all is said and done, the oddest of odd couples win the day within a catharsis of an ending befitting such an accomplished film. 40 minutes into the film we find our odd couple enjoying (enduring?) a quiet and straight-forward meal but feeling aggrieved, aggravated and on edge, the youngest in our odd couple partnership can hold his tongue no longer:
Simon: “You know all those people staring at me, at the DMV? That manager lady thought I was pathetic. You know that, right?”
Ed: “Kind of hard to miss, you know. You go all Section 8 and people are going to think that”
Simon: “I have a name. It’s not screw-loose. It’s not Section 8. Or retard. It’s Simon. SI-MON”
Simon fixes his reluctant crime fighting partner with a solid, unwavering look into his eyes for the first time in the film.
Ed: “Yeah. Simon it is”
Sarcastically, Simon repeats “Simon it is” as the scene comes to a close.
But who are these vigilante crime fighters?
“Simon McNally” (Jack Quaid) Mightily impressive as a man impervious to pain in this year’s Novacaine (directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olson) Jack Quaid returns on star form here as Simon (and definitely not “Screw Loose”, “Freak”, “Moron” or a “Batshit Loon” recently released from a “Cracker House”) a young man ten years unemployed and a decade lost within his continuing and debilitating mental health struggles. He may live with his sister but his abusive father is with him at every turn, his inner monologue a black dog of horribly depressing put downs and dismissals from a ghost of his past he can’t outrun. Heavily medicated and crushed by ferocious headaches and panic attacks, I see more than a hint of autism in Quaid’s performance (routines, social awkwardness, blunt and direct human interactions, distinct lack of eye contact) and especially his explanation that he speaks in “word salads” when he’s excited or anxious. This is or could be an extension of his mental health demons or simply a human mind running too fast for everything else to catch up, but Simon has seen a callous and unspeakable crime and no-one believes him, not even his next door neighbour.
“Ed Deerman” (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) Famously known around the world for his role as “Negan” in The Walking Dead, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is magnificent as the straight man to his new partner’s madness, but only just. For Ed Deerman lived and breathed a life he used to live that he’s now become an awkward caricature of the character he embodied for so long. As quick to act as he is to judge, Ed Deerman is a little lost inside his own time warp, a retired security guard not overly keen on retirement and far more than a uniformed guard keeping dog eye.
The odd couple have a crime to solve.
But who’s going to believe them?
I watched Neighborhood Watch without a shred of detail for the film and without the trailers I recommend you avoiding too, and found a really engaging, left-field film I highly recommend to you.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon