I Did What You Saw

For a movie about voyeurism, DISTURBIA (2007) isn’t very interested in people. A slick cooption of plot points from Alfred Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954) supersized and pimped out for Generation iPod, the suburban suspenser deftly misdirects attention from its shortcomings but anyone with half a brain will be hagged by its inconsistencies and contrivances on the ride home or even in the short distance from the TV room to bed. The screenplay by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth is at first glance economical, charismatic and rather neat. I couldn’t help but think, as the first act segued fairly smoothly into the second, that the script must have been a joy to read. As directed by D. J. Caruso, the film clips along, hits its marks and adds the wrinkle of a villain who catches on to the fact that he's been seen by his nosey parker neighbor and takes steps to neutralize the threat. Casting helps smooth over rough spots. Shia LaBeouf (worst name ever, by the way) is an engaging self-effacing hero, Sarah Roemer a refreshingly horse-faced Grace Kelly surrogate and David Morse a suitably creepy UnSub-next-door.

Frustratingly, DISTURBIA fails to honor its gimmick of a troubled teen whose lashing out at a teacher in the days following his father’s death has got him sentenced to house arrest. Cut off from the Internet and Xbox, his movements restricted by an electronic ankle monitor, our hero has fuck-all to do but gawk out the window, at which point he sees or thinks he sees a murder committed in the house next door. Such a concept demands a rigidly maintained set of rules with Rule No. 1 being that we, like the protagonist who is our eyes and ears, can never leave the house. That's how Hitchcock did it but the makers of DISTURBIA don't have those stones. They hedge their bets. They cheat.

If DISTURBIA had been shot digitally for $10,000 it would have been a nervy little flick that would know better than to waste precious film on scenes that take the viewer out of the home-prison and don’t advance the plot or do anything beyond bread out the leading lady’s screen time. But then it wouldn’t have raked in a boatload of multiplex money, so why am I wasting my breath?

While it ramps up the stakes of REAR WINDOW by reimagining that film's sweaty impulse killer as a cool multiple murderer, DISTURBIA's boogeyman hews to Standard Operating Psychopathy. A cunning sex killer who has moved on from his Texas hunting grounds to this California bedroom community, “Mr. Turner” is so committed to his craft that he has installed his own autopsy room (to have been a fly on the wall for that Home Depot consult) complete with white tile walls, fluorescent lights, and an array of postmortem tools, in addition to a Dario Argento-style fetid tarn in which bloated corpses bob in all their gerny decomp. Turner may be prescient enough to self-repair a car fender damaged in the acquisition of one victim and secure a deer carcass to explain the blood, hair and malodor in his garage... but then he chases one victim through his house with the shades up like Benny Hill on a bender, allowing Sherlock Homebound to get wise to his act. It’s dumb, it’s contradictory, it’s lazy and it killed the fun of DISTURBIA for me.

What's really disturbing in a totally unintentional way about DISTURBIA is that it uses the specter of serial sex murder as nothing more than a rite of passage, a hoop for its young hero to jump through so that he bag the girl next door. By the final fade-out, several women have been killed (one imagines the victims' families alerted to the grim fact that their missing daughters are all dead), a young uniformed policeman has lost his life (the obligatory final sacrificial lamb, dispatched with one of those effortless neck snaps that all serial killers can do), the hero’s mother and best friend have been viciously attacked and he himself has fallen bodily into a veritable gumbo of putrefying human remains kept as trophies by a man who can find sexual gratification only in the stalking, slaying and mutilation of women and whose predation no doubt began with the act of watching and the cold appraisal of others as objects for his entertainment… yet DISTURBIA ends with a light heart as boy and girl, detached from the horror around them, fall into bed to consummate a relationship for which slaughter and terror have been foreplay. Is that profoundly creepy or am I living in a world by myself?