Available on DVD: “Good Neighbors”

Emily Hampshire in Good Neighbors

Swerving from bland to brutal, endearingly coy to shockingly explicit, the Canadian import Good Neighbors finds pitch-black comedy among white-bread lives.

Set in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighborhood of Montreal in the autumn of 1995, this third feature from Jacob Tierney unfolds mostly indoors yet leans critically on its time and location. Quebec is on the verge of a nail-biting secession referendum, but for three residents of a spacious apartment building personal matters trump political uncertainty.

The film’s hub is Louise (Emily Hampshire), an intense young waitress with an unhealthy attachment to her two cats. Each day Louise shares her newspaper with the sexy widower downstairs (Scott Speedman) — whose wheelchair has earned him a ripped upper body and a nonthreatening reputation — but their cozy friendship is disrupted when a neurotic schoolteacher (Jay Baruchel) moves into the building and moves in on Louise. Naturally, she is far more drawn to his imported puss.

Based on a 1982 novel by the Québécois writer Chrystine Brouillet, Good Neighbors is an extended tease whose twisty pleasures require carefully gauged performances. Hampshire’s unsettling misanthropy, Speedman’s shark-like grin and Baruchel’s bewildered-nudnik shtick cement their characters’ oddball alliance.

We are never in any doubt as to the identity of the serial killer who haunts the news and the neighborhood’s shadowy corners, but suspense is not the point — alienation is. For three English-speaking Montrealers, facing an outside threat means relying only on one another. And sometimes on their pets.