NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH - Mark Reviews Movies

Neighborhood Watch, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 24, 2025

Nobody believes Simon (Jack Quaid), and even he isn't certain if he can trust what he sees and hears. The main character of Neighborhood Watch has mental health issues, undefined within Sean Farley's screenplay but most likely schizophrenia based on the symptoms, and when he witnesses the violent abduction of a young woman, no one accepts his eyewitness account as a matter of plain fact.

That becomes the most significant obstacle in the story, and there is perhaps a way for such an idea to make a bigger point about Simon and the stigmas attached to mental illness. Farley and director Duncan Skiles kind of get at those points throughout the movie, as other characters gradually realize that Simon might not have been experiencing a delusion when he witnessed a crime and that there might be much more to the young man than his unspecified condition.

The movie also, however, has an unfortunate habit of playing Simon and his symptoms as both a gimmick and a bit of a joke. We can accept the former to some degree, since this is a thriller of sorts about a pair of unlikely detectives and investigative partners trying to determine if the abduction happened and who's responsible for it. It's tougher to tolerate the humor aimed at Simon or attempted on account of his condition. These jokes aren't a constant, to be clear, but for a movie that takes everything else about its plot and characters seriously, it sticks out that Simon is the only butt of any real jokes for which the material goes.

Otherwise, the story is more or less effective in its low-key mystery-solving. Simon has returned from a court-mandated stay at a state mental health facility, following an episode that resulted in him assaulting a cop. He's now living with his older sister DeeDee (Malin Akerman), who left home when she was a teenager and left her younger brother alone in the house with their abusive father. Most of Simon's hallucinations and the voice that fills his head are of his father, whose berating, disparaging, and cruel behavior continue to haunt the young man, even after the father's death.

Beyond the plain fact that there's nothing funny about mocking mental illness in general, the movie itself, also plainly, makes Simon a tormented, dismissed, and sympathetic character right from the start, when a job interview at a local diner leads the interviewer to view him with suspicion and results in him having a hallucinatory episode at the restaurant. There's definitely nothing to laugh at in the specifics of this character or how the movie portrays him.

While walking around town, Simon spots a man and a woman in an alleyway. Stuck in fear and uncertainty, he just watches as the man hits the woman and forces her into a van. Simon gets the license plate number, but after walking to the police station, a skeptical detective (played by Cecile Cubiló) doesn't believe him, especially after she looks up Simon's record.

That leaves him to enlist the help of his neighbor Ed (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a man with his own issues—mainly that he was fired from a security position at a local college campus, can't let go of his former job, and has quite an abrasive personality. Ed is even more skeptical of Simon on a more foundational level (He calls him all sorts of insulting nicknames and thinks someone like him should stay in a facility), but if it's real or not, the puzzle of the abducted woman gives Ed something to do and the chance to pretend to possess some of the authority he has lost.

The plot, of course, has the pair follow a series of clues and leads—from the license plate number, to assorted means of finding out who the car might belong to, to questioning a sex worker on the street about a missing co-worker, to other potential hints or dead ends. It's basic stuff, obviously, but the do-it-themselves process of the investigation is clever (When pretending to be a cop fails, Ed just blackmails his old boss, who has a connection to the local police department). Plus, the dynamic of these two characters, with Simon as the guy who wants to do the right thing but doesn't know how to practically do it and Ed as a cynic who likes to flex some notion that he is in power, is engaging. Both Quaid and Morgan plays these roles with a bit more depth than we might expect, given how plot-focused Farley's script turns out to be.

There still remains the issue of how Simon is portrayed here. It really is an odd dichotomy, in that the character's past, condition, and struggles to lead a "normal" life are handled with some sensitivity. Meanwhile, the movie also attempts a light-hearted or almost teasing approach to the character's tendency toward "word salad" when he's excited and how his other symptoms get on Ed's nerves or cause problems in their investigation. Generally, the movie possesses some level of empathy for Simon, so those diversions mainly feel like hypocrisy on the filmmakers' part.

It's not a lot, but such moments and thinking are enough of a distraction from what's a nearly effective thriller with a couple of intriguing characters at its center. Neighborhood Watch does some things right but one notable thing wrong.

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