Film Review: "American Murder: The Family Next Door" (2020).

From Netflix and the director of Glamour Model Mum, Baby & Me comes American Murder: The Family Next Door. This true crime documentary film directed by Jenny Popplewell. Shanann Watts and her two young daughters went missing in Frederick, Colorado. As details of their deaths made headlines worldwide, it became clear that Shanann’s husband, Chris Watts, wasn’t the man he appeared to be. Experience a gripping and immersive examination of the disintegration of a marriage.

In the early morning of August 13, 2018, The Watts family murders occurred in Frederick, Colorado, United States. Christopher Lee Watts admitted to murdering his pregnant wife Shanann Cathryn Rzucek by strangulation. He later admitted to murdering their daughters, four-year-old Bella and three-year-old Celeste, by smothering them with a blanket over their heads. On November 6, 2018, Watts pleaded guilty to multiple counts of first-degree murder as part of a plea deal when the death penalty (which was later abolished in Colorado in 2020) was removed from sentencing. He was sentenced to five life sentences without the possibility of parole, three to be served consecutively.

The film tells the entire story through social media videos, text messages, phone call audio, original television newscasts, police body cameras and security camera footage. No narrator, no interviews, no dramatizations. Popplewell has done a great job of highlighting how deceptive we can all be when crafting our digital profiles. The film is as much a portrait of how incredibly well documented our lives are in the digital age as it is a true crime story about familial murder and failed cover-up. It's a heartbreaking tale, particularly since it's told in an unusual form: All the content comes from home movies, social media posts, phone calls and interrogation room videos. The film can't help but reflect the brutality and coldness of Chris's crimes. With studied precision, the movie embodies the type of emptiness it also seeks to document. Crucially, the documentary doesn't concern itself with digging deeper into Chris Watts's persona, with mythologizing him or probing for underlying motives in his behavior. A true-crime documentary far more chilling, yet also emotionally affecting than works of this type generally tend to be. If Popplewell doesn't always manage to justify quite how extensively Shannan's private life is being disseminated here, she nonetheless takes great pleasure in detailing how Chris's story was vigorously pulled apart by the police. Clocking in at eighty-three minutes, it squeezes all it possibly can out of its subject matter. It could almost have been an episode in a show, but it works as a standalone feature regardless. Popplewell's film presents the Watts story as more than a crime story. It is a thematic film about marriage and the deception of social media, as well as a piercing examination of domestic violence constructed with care and undeniable craft. This story is heart-wrenching and horrifying. Yet the telling of it in American Murder: The Family Next Door is deeply satisfying.

Simon says American Murder: The Family Next Door receives: