“Neighborhood Alert,” directed by Ngozi Onwurah
San Diego Short Film Festival
Genre: Drama
Total Run Time: 30:11

This is another short film with a deceptively simple premise: Bola (Constance Ejuma) goes to some extraordinary lengths to try to keep her teenage son Chike (Noah Abbott) safe. She takes a job as a live-in nurse in a safe, upper-class neighborhood to move him away from street crime and attend a better school. Despite entering their new living situation with eyes completely open, they can’t avoid the long arm of the racism… er, the law. Same thing.

I got to thinking about the definitions of “assault” and “battery” while watching this. We tend to use them interchangeably but, short version, the latter is the act of harming someone while the former is the threat of harming someone. That’s an important distinction because “Neighborhood Alert” is a series of non-stop assaults with no actual on-screen battery. It’s alternatively harrowing, infuriating and anxiety inducing, and it delivers suspense in exactly the way that Alfred Hitchcock said it should be done: show the audience the bomb under the table but don’t let it go off.

Here, white people are the explosive, with racism as the catalyst. Chike suffers a string of ripped-from-the-headlines racial indignities at the hands of his neighbors, and each situation is deadly serious. But even the well-meaning coterie of the “good” white residents can’t stop what feels inevitable but thankfully occurs off screen.

This is a thoroughly professional production, so there’s not much point in lauding the work behind the camera, which is uniformly excellent, or the work in front of the camera, which is also uniformly excellent and filled with people whose familiar faces will send you scurrying for IMDB. Ejuma and Abbott are perfect for the material, and the material from writer/director Onwurah is consistently better than it needs to be, demonstrating a deft hand with all of the elements of effective storytelling.

“Neighborhood Alert” is not an easy watch, but it’s an essential watch.