‘American Murder: The Family Next Door’
The plot revolves around a real story of 2018- Watts Family murder, set in Fedrick, Colorado. It utilizes archival images such as social media posts, police records, texts, and home videos to portray events.
All that you should know about this criminal case.
On August 15, 2018, Chris Watts publicly admitted that he had killed his pregnant wife, Shan’ann, but said he was in fury as she had choked their children as a reaction to his request for separation. Just a few days later, he admitted the lie and confessed that he murdered their two young daughters as well. In the meantime, all the hell broke loose. The Colorado drama gained national attention, and for a few days, Shan’ann became the central focus for a specific set of media-obsessed wackos who thought nothing of tearing away the reputation of a dead woman because-
a) social media made it easy
b) her husband did the same thing
‘American Murder: The Family Next Door’ All About
Jenny Popplewell’s slickly produced “American Murder: The Next Door Family” only devotes just a few minutes evaluating those terrible days when people and pundits took to TV and the internet to announce that Shan’ann deserved to die, but her true-crime documentary also rests on the same data that so many people slung at her. An exquisitely-produced glance at a horrific act, Popplewell’s documentary carefully encompasses a plethora of data — including body-camera footage from the first cop on the incident, cramped investigation room set-ups, and social-media messages that so many armchair sleuths pored over to disprove Shan’ann — that it almost feels too ready for film treatment.
Anyone familiar with the Watts case joins the documentary from a bizarre standpoint, and it’s one that Popplewell doesn’t try to divert: we already know the motives of the murderer. While Popplewell doesn’t worry too much about questioning the motives of Chris (actually, what motive might explain the annihilation of the family?), long before he confesses to the murders, the filmmaker lays out one hell of a case against him. The crime seemed to be tailor-made for easy consumption: a lovely young family, apparently happy and well off, cracked wide open when mother and baby were missing, leaving an attractive father begging for them to come home. The film Popplewell aims to build the narrative from within, opening up the family of Watts with a slick and heavy social media structure and then implodes them as they reveal themselves in the case (and the truth).