The Neighbors Are Watching, a.k.a. The House Across the Road (RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 21) I more or less subjected my husband Charles to two movies on the Lifetime channel, The Neighbors Are Watching (shot under the working title The House Across the Road) and My Landlord Wants Me Dead. These were both “O.K. but nothing special” movies. The Neighbors Are Watching dealt with Amy Horton (played by an actress with the unlikely name “Kabby Borders”), who settles in a suburban town and takes a job as a teacher at “East Coweta High School” to escape her traumatic past. Her traumatic past included a husband who beat her regularly and threatened to kill her if she ever left him. It’s quite a while before we find out what happened, but eventually it’s revealed that during their final confrontation he threatened to shoot her, she tried to grab for the gun, they wrestled for it and ultimately it went off and killed him. She was arrested for his murder but acquitted on grounds of self-defense, after which she resumed her original name and under that identity got the teaching job at East Coweta High. In her new suburban community – of which we get some aerial shots indicating that it’s the sort of “instant” village Malvina Reynolds satirized in her most famous song, “Little Boxes” – she’s instantly approached by a motley crew of neighbors befriending her and welcoming her to the neighborhood. Among them is a middle-aged white woman named Betsy (Elena Kent) who’s married to an age-peer Black man named Steve (Jerard McWhirter), and it’s indicative of how much racial progress we’ve made that this is depicted matter-of-factly and no big deal is made of it. Betsy welcomes Amy to the neighborhood with a bottle of wine, which they proceed to drink in midday, as well as a preposterously ugly lamp Betsy dug up on one of her antiques-buying expeditions. There’s also a newlywed couple, Jared and Nicole (Jordan Frechtman and Deb Foster), who inundate Amy with a succession of home-baked apple pies. Just as Amy is moving in, so is a hot-looking young man named Henry Hach (Will Holland), and apparently because they’re the only two single people in the neighborhood, Betsy is bound and determined to get them together. Any hardened Lifetime movie-watcher would be suspicious of Henry if only because in Lifetime’s usual iconography hot-looking men are almost always villains, but it takes writer Ken Miyamoto and director Haylie Duff seemingly forever to tell us what Henry is up to really.

Midway through the movie Henry, who by this time has already seduced Amy and is having a hot ‘n’ heavy affair with her, leaves for a couple of days on a so-called “business trip.” He’s a building contractor who said he needed to travel out of town to arrange future jobs, but when he returns Amy spots him with another woman, frolicking with her in his living room while both are stripped down to their underwear. Though Henry and Amy have only been dating for a month, Amy has taken the relationship seriously enough she gets jealous at the thought of him with another woman. Amy confronts Henry about it and Henry tells her that the woman is Henry’s sister and she only stayed at his place because she had nowhere else to go. Amy later sees the same woman at Henry’s place again, and this time she directly confronts Henry and literally slaps his face in front of the neighbors. The third time Amy sees Henry with this other woman, he literally carries her out of his house while she screams at the top of her lungs. Then Henry carries a bundle out of his home and puts it in the trunk of his car, and Amy assumes it’s the woman’s body after Henry has killed her. She reports it to the police, but the officer who comes out to investigate, Detective Wilson (Major Dodge), finds out that it’s only a rolled-up carpet and criticizes Amy for being alarmist and jumping to wrong conclusions. Before long Amy is fired from her teaching job by her boss, Principal Richard Diaz (Henry Noble), after it’s revealed that she got her job under false pretenses because she didn’t reveal she’d been tried for murder under her married name and had then reverted to her original one to apply for the job. In vain she protests that she was acquitted in court, but the school board rules that she violated the school district’s “honor code” and orders Diaz to let her go. Writer Miyamoto puts Amy through the Kafka-esque tribulations beloved of Lifetime scribes generally, as the neighbors take Henry’s side and some of them tell Amy she needs to get over him and get professional help.

Ultimately Amy breaks into Henry’s home – fortunately he’s left a spare key under his doormat (do people actually still do that?) – and steals his laptop, which is open to a prostitution Web site from which Henry hired the woman both we and Amy previously saw at his place. She is Nikki (Jessie Vaughn), and Amy rents a motel room for the night and calls her. Nikki naturally assumes at first that there’s a man with Amy and she’s been hired for a three-way. Then, when Amy says, “There’s only me,” Nikki assumes that Amy is a Lesbian – and when Amy says she only wants information but is willing to pay Nikki double her usual rate for it (since she’s just lost her job and still owes house payments, where is Amy getting all this money?), Nikki gets the lowdown on what Henry hired her for. First he just wanted her to come over and talk; the second time they actually had sex – though she recalled it as rough – and the third time Henry told her he wanted her to undress down to bra and panties and let Henry carry her outside while she screamed as if in terror. There was a fourth time, too, but she doesn’t offer any details other than it was so bad she didn’t want to see him again. At first I thought Henry was an O.K. guy and it was Betsy who was the real villainess; later I fell for a red herring Miyamoto threw us about the woman who’d previously owned Henry’s house and whom the neighbors had driven away because she wasn’t friendly enough for them; but ultimately I decided that Henry must be a relative of Amy’s abusive ex out for revenge against her for killing him. He turns out to be Henry Lombardi, brother of Joe Lombardi, Amy’s late ex – though when Amy learns that “Lombardi” was Henry’s real last name, she doesn’t seem to associate that with her late husband (or was he using a different last name during their marriage?). Ultimately Henry corners Amy in her house and is about to kill her when Betsy emerges as a deus ex machina and clobbers him with a surpassingly ugly lamp she’d given Amy early on in the story (sort of like Chekhov’s pistol).

The Neighbors Are Watching is a pretty mediocre Lifetime movie, though it has its good points. Actress-turned-director Haylie Duff has a real flair for Gothic horror and suspense, and it would be nice to see her get a script that would offer her more to work with than this one. And Miyamoto’s writing has some nice things to say about the peculiar fishbowl this community is and how oppressed it would get after a while. If you ever thought you’d like to have neighbors who took an interest in you and cared about your comings and goings, this film would quickly disabuse you of that notion; these people are so good at delving into each other’s lives and finding their deepest, darkest secrets one wonders why the CIA doesn’t just hire them en masse. Other than that, The Neighbors Are Watching is O.K., and I could have wished for a better actress in the lead than the ridiculously named Kabby Borders (though her performance gets stronger as the film progresses), but I particularly liked Elena Kent as Betsy. She’s middle-aged and heavy-set (her imdb.com page doesn’t give her age, but she’s been married to Kevin Kent since 1996 and it’s not hard to deduce that she’s been around the block more than a few years), and no doubt she’s all too aware of the limited opportunities available, but oh, how she seizes on this one!