Review: Disturbia

A strong start, a sag in the middle and a very suspenseful finish... that's the arc of Disturbia in a nutshell.

Shia LeBeouf plays troubled 17-year-old Kale, who a year earlier survived a personal tragedy that he's yet to come to terms with. As a result of that event, his behaviour has been on a downward spiral, culminating in his lashing out at his Spanish teacher during class. That particular misstep - not his first! - lands him in court and gets the young man sentenced to 3 months of house arrest. As such, he can't go further than his own yard without risking jail time. Cabin fever soon leads to voyeurism, and before long he's convinced, in true Rear Window fashion, that one of his neighbours is a serial killer. And there you have the setup for Disturbia, similarly in a nutshell.

Parts of the movie require a good helping of disbelief suspension - like when one person who's been acting terrified suddenly decides to pull a prank! - but the first several minutes and the last hour or so make up for the occasional goofiness in the plot. When Kale's first learning to deal with his home-incarceration, I found him pretty hard to take (as I'm sure we're supposed to). LaBeouf hits all of his standard notes, as his acting repertoire seems to consist of: smart ass comments, a heart of gold that takes awhile to reveal itself, and a willingness to risk it all in the name of love at some point (here, the objects of his affection are neighbour Ashley, played by Sarah Roemer, and his struggling mother, a still-pretty-hot Carrie Anne Moss). Prior to the extended climax, Kale's big moment comes when he confesses to Ashley that he has, indeed, been spying on her from his bedroom... but what he says about what he's seen of her shows that he's done the exact opposite of objectifying her, and in the process he wins her over (and us, too, I suppose).

Besides the places where your common sense is assaulted, there are also aspects of the story that just never seem to pay off completely. One character who had all the earmarks of being introduced to play a significant role later, for example, then simply serves to become another victim of the killer (accomplishing nothing in the process). Similarly, I expected some sort of closure on the trauma that opens the film, but nothing in the resolution of the main plot really echoes back to it. I think a defter hand on the screenplay could've tightened it up just a bit, and transformed this into a really first-rate thriller.

David Morse is appropriately creepy as the shady neighbour, although I wish I wasn't always seeing him in roles that are quite this dark! Moss is also fine as Kale's mother, given that she doesn't really have all that much to work with. Aaron Yu, as best-friend Ronnie, provides some of the funniest moments, but also a few of the least believable.

The two women with whom I watched Disturbia were literally squirming in their seats throughout the last third of the movie, and not from boredom! The tension during that portion of the story is very well done, and definitely reminds the older film fan of Hitchcock's Rear Window, while not being in that same class, overall, of course. It was definitely worth the couple of hours of my time that it took up, though.

Rating: ***