American Murder: The Family Next Door

Name: American Murder: The Family Next Door
Genre: Documentary, Crime
Released: 2020-09-29T00:00:00Z
Duration: 83 min
Rating: 7.25
Cast: Chris Watts, Jenny Popplewell, Shanann Watts, Celeste 'CC' Watts, Bella Watts

Documentary Crime

7.3/ 10

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Premiere

Sep2020

Studio

Knickerbockerglory TV

About

Synopsis

American Murder: The Family Next Door (2020) is Jenny Popplewell's documentary, available to watch online on iFILM. The film reconstructs the case of pregnant Shanann Watts and her two young daughters, who vanished from a small Colorado town in August 2018.

There are no talking heads and no narrator telling you what to think. Everything on screen is firsthand: Shanann's own social-media clips, home videos, text threads, police body-cam footage and the recorded interviews with her husband Chris. The story plays out almost in real time, from the worried call placed by her friend Nickole, who noticed Shanann had gone silent, to the moment the polished image of a model family starts cracking in front of you.

Popplewell assembles the whole thing as a mosaic of primary sources, leaving the viewer to piece the truth together. The case had already saturated American news, yet it's this edit of authentic material that makes the watch genuinely hard to sit through. Not entertainment but a cold examination of how a carefully maintained surface hid a catastrophe. Stream American Murder: The Family Next Door (2020) online on iFILM.

Cast