Good Neighbours

It's late 1995 in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG) neighborhood of Montréal. In being a gossip, landlady Mme. Gauthier makes it a point to get to know the business of the tenants in her older four story walk-up apartment building. Third floor tenant Louise, whose life revolves around her two cats, Mozart and Tia Maria, and who has somewhat retreated from life otherwise, works as a waitress in a neighborhood Chinese-Canadian restaurant. Beyond her cats, she is fixated on the yet unsolved serial murders in NDG of young women, who are raped before their throats are slit. Spencer, who lives on the second floor, is at the moment largely confined to his apartment as he has been in a wheelchair ever since the car accident last year that claimed the life of his wife. His doctors believe that he will eventually walk again. He keeps himself busy by tending to the several elaborate aquariums in his apartment. While Louise and Spencer are friends, Mme. Gauthier and Spencer's physical therapist Miss Van Ilen would like to see that friendship blossom into romance. Extremely loud and angry Francophone Valérie, who lives in the building with her often "away-on-'business'" husband in their marital discord, is the bane of everyone else's existence in the building, while they are the bane of hers, Mozart and Tia Maria getting into the garbage cans outside her window on the fire escape which is her most vocal current complaint. Having just moved into a top floor unit after a stint in China, socially awkward Victor, an elementary school teacher, does whatever he can to befriend Spencer and especially Louise, his attempts playing on what he believes is their most basic needs/wants. This combination of people and situations ends up being deadly, which may or may not be related to the serial murders. Individual self-preservation may take over in each person trying to keep his or her own fundamental secret.—Huggo