Review of “Disturbia”
What is every teenager’s horror nightmare? To be grounded in the suburbs with no phone, TV, internet or X-box. Oh my goodness! I’ll have to watch the neighbours instead! And that’s what Kale (Shia LaBeouf) does, in true Rear Window style, when he’s sentenced to three months house arrest for attacking a teacher. Whilst James Stewart sat by the window with his leg in plaster and played out his paranoid musings about a killer across the yard, Kale is confined by an electronic anklet that calls the police if he leaves the grounds. He too has a suspicious neighbour, in the form of Mr. Turner (David Morse) who seems to have links to the strange disappearance of women in the area. On the bright side, if the slightly creepy Turner isn’t compelling enough viewing, Kale can always spy on Ashley (Sarah Roemer), the teenage beauty who’s just moved in next door. Despite, or perhaps because of Kale’s pervy behaviour, he and Ashley soon become friends and co-opt Kale’s buddy Ronnie (Aaron Yoo) to help out in their surveillance operation. The three teens watch Turner with the latest hi-tech communications gadgets but their suspicions seem flaky and unfounded. They wonder whether, with paranoia common currency, they are simply making things add up to more than the sum of their less than wholesome parts.
Director D.J. Caruso starts this teen thriller with a bone-crunching bang and holds the momentum strongly in the first half, until the romance lightens the tone. There are moments when this could have been a contender for a Rear Window update, especially when the teen voyeurs decide to break into Turner’s house with a video camera wired to send its dramatic footage back to Kale’s TV. But it’s let down by an overly worked ending and some dodgy plot devices, most particularly the inconsistent actions of the police.
Rising star LaBoeuff is excellent as the troubled housebound adolescent and there are solid performances from the rest of the cast – including Carrie-Ann Moss who plays Kale’s mother Julie. All the other production elements – including Geoff Zanelli’s chilling music - are of the highest quality, making this a very slick teen thriller.
Rating:
Leave a Reply