Serial killer next door? Put him on YouTube. Neighbour cheating on his wife? Honey, get out the camera phone!
Voyeurs used to need binoculars, or at least a good view, to spy on the unsuspecting masses around them. Now they're hard-pressed to turn away from their flatscreens long enough to see out the window.
Our evolution from a culture that values privacy to one that resents it goes a long way in making Disturbia forgivable and, purists be damned, justifiable.
Yes, yes, many a critic will wag their finger at director D.J. Caruso's teenaged redo of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 classic Rear Window. But the fact is, most of Disturbia's target audience (20 and under) wasn't born when James Stewart starred in that 1954 classic. For that matter, neither were their parents.
Consider Disturbia, then, a stylishly saucy thriller for film-goers whose idea of a Hitchcockian mystery is who fathered Anna Nicole Smith's baby.
Shia LaBeouf -- a talented young actor who paid his dues playing sidekick to the likes of Keanu Reeves and Will Smith in Constantine and I, Robot -- stars as Kale, a high schooler sentenced to house arrest after he decks his Spanish teacher.
Sequestered to his bedroom, stripped of the Internet and his Xbox 360 by his widowed mother (Carrie Anne Moss), Kale keens to the thought of playing peeping Tom, treating his neighbours as the stars of his own reality TV show. And really, do you need Gears of War when the gorgeous, bikini-clad girl next door (Sarah Roemer) goes for a scantily clad swim every day? But things -- as they did for wheelchair-bound Stewart -- go askew when Kale starts to suspect that his neighbour spends his nights hacking up bodies.
Paranoia sets in rapidly, especially when Kale's mom starts bringing the dude (the always-exceptional David Morse) home. More than most of his peers, LeBeouf makes for a likeable, ankle-bracelet-saddled sleuth, while Caruso confidently ratchets the suspense. Even the romantic subplot -- never advised in a taut thriller such as this -- is winning enough to make it a welcome distraction.
Scarier, though, than what lurks in Morse's basement are the frightful possibilities Disturbia may inspire.
Casablanca meets The Breakfast Club? Gone With The Wind meets Porky's?
Some doors really shouldn't be opened.
(This film is rated PG)
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