The constant barrage of media coverage of terrorist threats serves as a backdrop to our lives. While many people ignore the undercurrent of mistrust, suspicion of strangers and outsiders, and concerns about security; others feed their paranoia on such toxic reports. Terry Allan (Peter Krause) is an accountant. He and his wife Maria (Kari Matchett) have a house they want to purchase with a loan. But that dream has to be put on hold when he loses his job. Terry has a temper and in a hostile encounter with a very friendly bank teller, he displays the cruelty and rage that is festering inside him.
That anger comes to a boil when Gabe Hassan (Khaled Abol Naga), "a Middle Eastern guy" as he calls him, moves into their apartment complex. Unable to sleep late at night, Terry sees the young man throw away several bags of garbage. Intrigued and with nothing else to do with his time after sending out a batch of resumes, Terry starts watching his neighbor, even following him in his car. He shares his suspicions that he might be a terrorist with Maria. She can't believe her ears and goes down to the newcomer's apartment and introduces herself. Gabe tells her that he's a graduate student. Although Terry knows that she wants him to drop his surveillance, he persists and eventually calls the FBI. Agent Hillary (Richard Schiff) meets with him and listens to his conspiracy theories about his neighbor.
Civic Duty is a riveting psychological thriller that convincingly conveys the dangerous potential consequences of paranoid thinking about terrorists all around us. The CNN broadcasts provide Terry with plenty of material for the stories that he tells himself about Gabe. These escalate when he finds the door to the neighbor's apartment open and discovers beakers with chemicals and references to an organization called Sons of Benevolence. When Maria tries to dissuade him from this obsession with Gabe, he tells her that it is the responsibility of vigilant citizens to look out for dangerous terrorists. He has already told Agent Hillary that he once considered joining the FBI. The final confrontation between Terry and Gabe takes place in the newcomer's apartment as police surround the place.
Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, has written: "Paranoia is a word that has entered the popular vocabulary. Literally, (although, of course, not technically) it means to be out of your mind. To be paranoid is to have lost your way, like Dante wandering in a land that is far from home." Civic Duty is a compelling study of paranoia and the wild and destructive behavior it can spawn.
