Disturbia

April 12, 2007

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 104 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

This movie is going to be endlessly compared to Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW. It’s a better movie than a straight remake of REAR WINDOW would be. It anticipates some of the problems of telling a modern version of that story and comes up with inventive solutions.

Disturbia Christopher Reeve made a remake of REAR WINDOW, but for anyone else to try it, they need a different gimmick.

And these days, you have to be more explicit in the voyeurism, but then you run the risk of your protagonist being too creepy.

One way might be to have the voyeur be female. That angle comes in too, but first, they start off with the voyeur being a horny teenage boy.

In this age of YouTube and camera phones, we’ve all become voyeurs.

Shia LeBeouf (who was in HOLES, and was rumored to be playing Indiana Jones’s son in the next Indy flick) plays a basically good teenager, who, due to an unfortunate incident of Unmanaged Anger, is now under house arrest in his suburban home, with a GPS electronic ankle bracelet.

His mom (Carrie-Anne Moss) works most of the time; she’s holding down a trinity of jobs to make ends meet. Stuck in the house all day and night, he’s got cabin fever, and so uses binoculars and a video camera to spy on various neighbors.

One of the Heavenly Bodies he sees through his ground-based astronomy is the girl next door, who eventually catches him at his Peeping Tom routine, and, somewhat to the surprise of both of them, takes up his voyeurism hobby.

Eventually they start to suspect that one neighbor (David Morse) may be a serial killer.

What’s clever about this is, due to the ankle bracelet alerting the police if he leaves his yard, it’s actually a lot more suspenseful than Jimmy Stewart being confined to a wheelchair in REAR WINDOW; because he can get up and go at any time… it’s just that the threat of jail hangs over him like a mental force field.

This is a surprisingly smart thriller.

Posted by Mack Guffin | Filed Under 3 Stars, Action, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Morse, Drama, Horror, PG-13, Sarah Roemer, Shia LaBeouf, Theatrical, Thriller