Fantasia CR: Neighborhood Watch

There are a lot of films with disturbing scenes out there, but only a handful of truly disturbing FILMS – films such as In A Glass Cage, Salo, Men Behind The Sun. Well if that kind of sick shit turns you on, rejoice because now you can add Neighborhood Watch, U.S. director Graeme Whifler’s twisted meditation on suburban dementia.

Simply put, the plot concerns a nutjob who decides to make life miserable for his new next door neighbors. Just how he goes about that is why you canNOT miss this film.

Neighborhood Watch is an expertly constructed animal. The film lulls you into a false sense of complacency by introducing black comic flourishes while simultaneously laying a tightwire foundation. Placing it’s characters in a world that is recognizably mundane (the office, the suburban neighborhood), makes the grotesqueries approaching all the more effective. By the film’s homestretch, you’ll be thankful for the humor which serves to pull the proceedings back from the brink of the unbearable.

For a comic, low budget undertaking that actually has very little violence for the bulk of it’s duration, this film has a startlingly impressive psychological intensity to it. This is the vanguard of extreme filmmaking.

Reviewer’s notes:
Someone sitting about ten people to my left passed out during a particularly gruesome scene causing a mini commotion. This could have been a publicity stunt, or maybe just a narcoleptic but the whole episode seemed on the level.