Jack Quaid (Companion, The Hunger Games) plays the latter as Simon McNally, with Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Walking Dead, The Postcard Killings) as his reluctant (at first) helper, Ed Deerman. Simon struggles with paranoid schizophrenia and has recently been discharged from a psychiatric institution after a decade of treatment. He often hallucinates - both visually and auditorily - mostly relating to his abusive, deceased father. Ed lives next door to Simon and is an ex-security guard from a local college campus, now unemployed. Ed lives alone, but Simon lives with his sister, DeeDee, played by Malin Akerman (Watchmen), who works hard to support them both financially while Simon tries to re-enter society.
While out in the neighbourhood one day, Simon witnesses an incident in which a young woman is abducted by a man in a white van, who forces her inside. The audience is, of course, encouraged throughout a lot of this to question whether or not Simon is hallucinating, and this forms much of the backdrop to the resulting incidents and adventures in this somewhat comedy/drama-turned-(kind of) Buddy Cop film. Buddy Cop because, after much persuasion, the life-embittered Ed next door is convinced that in order to keep Simon from badgering him, he'll play along and 'investigate' the claim for him.
It turns out that Simon has remembered the number plate of the van, but we see him seeing the man's face with no eyes - blurred out. At this point, I did wonder if we were heading into some alien/sci-fi story, but no - if the incident occurred, the blurred face was down to what Simon was seeing (and sharing with us). Simon heads to the police station to report the incident, but they soon find out about his background, so they politely palm him off, not believing him. It turns out that the number plate he remembered belonged to a vehicle hundreds of miles away - which didn't help Simon's cause.
So Ed picks up the cause instead, and they start a series of adventures as they try to piece together what they can from any clues they can find. Ed, still not believing Simon but with nothing better to do than play poker on his computer, tags along, becoming more interested in the potential mystery as he goes. He likes to flash his badge (which he seems to have kept from his old job) and play out a detective role, heavily implying to people that he's a cop.
We end up in a scrapyard full of cars, at Ed's old workplace office pulling in favours, and even in the company of sex workers based on Simon’s memory of the victim's clothing - resulting in Ed's car getting vandalised by a local pimp and them being warned off. It's beginning to look like there is substance to what Simon has seen and the pair of them start to uncover stuff as they go. As the film moves forward, violence is further introduced, Simon's frustration often comes out in verbal aggression (tamed by Ed) and angst galore grows as still nobody will believe the pair.
So that's the setup. Yes, it does sometimes play out like a comedy, sometimes a serious crime drama and other times a commentary on life, people's mental health issues, and how those issues impact not only how they navigate their way through life, but also how other people treat them - particularly when it comes to something that relies solely on them having been the single witness to an event that may or may not have happened. If you've read this far, you will have by now realised that there is, at least, some truth to what Simon saw, but I'll leave you to find out what that is and how it fits in.
The two leads are excellent throughout - I particularly enjoyed watching Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who reminded me somewhat of Javier Bardem in looks and style. Everyone else around them also pulled their weight, so there are no poor performances in sight, and it's an interesting bit of light entertainment really. It's sometimes slow and sometimes gets bogged down in terms of where it's going, but the director pulls it back, re-establishing the pace. Nicely shot, some action, but mostly it hangs on the mystery. A nice little film - recommended, as it's now just arriving on streaming in the UK.
