Title: Good Neighbors

Opens: July 29, 2011

Some Americans seem to think that Canadians are a bland bunch-generally English-speaking, health problems taken care of, no major wars in memory, live-and-let-live. Perhaps an exception is made for Quebecois since to us here in the States a French-speaking people would be considered ethnic and thereby more passionate. The ironically named good neighbors in Jacob Tierney’s picture, based on a novel by Chrystine Brouillet, would be among the many exceptions that could prove the rule as the three flawed principals and a bevy of flawed side players are anything but ordinary and bland.

Tierney’s movie is in the tradition of Roman Polanski’s apartment-house trilogy-“The Tenant,” “Repulsion,” ” Rosemary’s Baby”-as most of the action takes place within three apartments in an old walk-up in a residential area of Montreal. “Good Neighbors” is not unlike “The Tenant,” Polanski’s story of a man who moves into an apartment in which a former resident committed suicide and thinks that the landlord and his neighbors want him to end his own life as well. Much of the action could probably be performed on a live stage, though the picture is surely cinematic enough.

In this story, Spencer (Scott Speedman) and Louise (Emily Hampshire) have been living in a walk-up, Louise making regular visits to Spencer, a lover of classical music though signifying his danger to the audience by feeding small fish to the live fish in his two aquariums. Louise seems asexual and emotionally placid, unable to be alarmed when she discovers something of her neighbor wholly out of the ordinary. She appears also able to relate better to her two cats than to people, conversing with them, sleeping with them (literally), and regularly opening and closing her window to let them out and bring them in. When Victor (Jay Baruchel), an elementary school teacher who has just returned from a stint in northern China with his cat, Balthazar, moves in, he tries much too hard to make friends with the two, coming across neurotically with stammers and with apologies for minor breaches of civility. Oddly enough considering that this is a walk-up apartment building, Spencer is confined to a wheelchair on the fourth floor, victim of an auto accident that took the life of his wife.

The story takes place amid the background of Quebec province’s second vote in 1995 on whether to secede from Canada, the French-speaking population largely in favor, the Anglophiles against. The politics are important in that the three young English-speaking principals seek one another out while one woman in the building, a Francophone who hates cats, is shrill, cursing her husband for taking a trip without her and leaving her alone in the apartment.

While there is considerable action in the movie, involving pretty young women who worry about walking the streets at night since a serial rapist-killer is on the loose, most of the film is taken up with clever dialogue, with Louise finding herself sought separately by Victor and Spencer in a plot that the two men devise to get rid of each other. The serial-killer motif provides the tension but so does the give and take among the three young people. Spencer often has a broad, patronizing smile on his handsome face, contrasted with the nervous energy of the new resident, while Louise, seemingly unperturbed by anything going on around her, gets violently inflamed when she suspects a woman of poisoning her beloved cats.

“Good Neighbors” provides one of the most graphically violent scenes you’re likely to see this year involving a bloody close-up of a rape-murder in progress. Though the politicking of the young people in the apartment building is more involving that what we hear of the referendum on provincial secession, some of the plot is unbelievable, even laughable. This is a most watchable film on the whole, the contrast between Scott Speedman’s character and that of Jay Baruchel serving as its highlight.

Rated R. 99 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Technical: B

Overall: B