Written by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth, and directed by D.J. Caruso, Disturbia disturbs us as much as it does Kale, the 17-year-old protagonist. The boy loses his father in a road accident, with himself behind the wheel, thereby compounding his grief, his overwhelming sense of loss, with guilt. Embodying his school’s indifference to his pain, a teacher castigates and humiliates him in front of his classmates and trespasses on his most personal, private territory of anguished feelings by chiding him about what his father might have felt about his sullen classroom behavior. Kale responds as any adolescent boy, given the circumstance and the provocation, might: he instantly punches this teacher in the face. Brought up on assault charges, the judge, professing being lenient, sentences Kale to three summertime months of house arrest. Meanwhile, his mother, Julie, like Kale’s school, apparently does nothing to provide her son with psychological counseling, although she keeps telling others how horrible it is for a boy to lose his father. Meanwhile meanwhile, when his binocular snooping on his neighbors leads Kale to suspect one of them, Robert Turner, of being a serial killer of women, nobody believes him—this, despite a density of local news reports about an ongoing series of missing women. Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, Julie strikes up a friendship with Turner and agrees to go out on a date with him. To Kale, it might seem that she is “moving on” in quite a hurry.
What I have summarized as disturbing mixes plot and my own interpretation; that is to say, some of it “happens” under the surface. Turner, it turns out, is indeed what Kale suspects, and the film’s plot eventually requires him to rescue his mother from Turner’s murderous intent. This in turn requires that he violate the terms of his confinement—not for the first time, I might add—by leaving his home, trespassing on Turner’s property and breaking into Turner’s home, which turns out to be a house of horrors, with corpses hidden in spaces hidden in walls, and a medical torture room way below. After a lot of red herring-adolescent frolic, the film becomes a nightmare, a way of Kale’s working his way out of a load of intolerable guilt for his father’s death: by saving Mom, he will put Dad’s haunting spirit to rest. By ridding the world of Turner, a kind of unwanted surrogate father and the living embodiment of the guilt he associates with his deceased actual father, Kale will free himself from his mental imprisonment for the rest of his life.
This he must do for himself because he is left to do it by himself—although two friends, including the girl who is also a neighbor, have assisted in the adventure.
The film is full of technology, beginning with the electronic ankle bracelet used to monitor Kale during his term of house arrest. Computer, Internet, iPod, Xbox games: all these and other technological things figure into the mise-en-scène. It is all a part of Kale’s world; but the implication arises that such things draw energy away from what ought to be primary: a concern for people. Fittingly, the film ends in a romantic clinch.
Shia LeBeouf, in the lead role, has one great moment, when Kale realizes that his father is dead. The camera is kept on Kale’s face, and the shot haunts. For the rest, LeBeouf is adequate. David Morse is exceptionally creepy as Robert Turner. Shots showing Turner’s oversized face as Turner peers indoors at night through windows, rendering him ghostlike, are the film’s creepiest shots.
But this juvenile reincarnation of Alfred Hitchcock’s gloriously sophisticated Rear Window (1954) quickly becomes infantile. Disturbia, despite a couple of moments of real terror, is not a good movie.
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DISTURBIA (D.J. Caruso, 2007)
Written by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth, and directed by D.J. Caruso, Disturbia disturbs us as much as it does Kale, the 17-year-old protagonist. The boy loses his father in a road accident, with himself behind the wheel, thereby compounding his grief, his overwhelming sense of loss, with guilt. Embodying his school’s indifference to his pain, a teacher castigates and humiliates him in front of his classmates and trespasses on his most personal, private territory of anguished feelings by chiding him about what his father might have felt about his sullen classroom behavior. Kale responds as any adolescent boy, given the circumstance and the provocation, might: he instantly punches this teacher in the face. Brought up on assault charges, the judge, professing being lenient, sentences Kale to three summertime months of house arrest. Meanwhile, his mother, Julie, like Kale’s school, apparently does nothing to provide her son with psychological counseling, although she keeps telling others how horrible it is for a boy to lose his father. Meanwhile meanwhile, when his binocular snooping on his neighbors leads Kale to suspect one of them, Robert Turner, of being a serial killer of women, nobody believes him—this, despite a density of local news reports about an ongoing series of missing women. Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, Julie strikes up a friendship with Turner and agrees to go out on a date with him. To Kale, it might seem that she is “moving on” in quite a hurry.
What I have summarized as disturbing mixes plot and my own interpretation; that is to say, some of it “happens” under the surface. Turner, it turns out, is indeed what Kale suspects, and the film’s plot eventually requires him to rescue his mother from Turner’s murderous intent. This in turn requires that he violate the terms of his confinement—not for the first time, I might add—by leaving his home, trespassing on Turner’s property and breaking into Turner’s home, which turns out to be a house of horrors, with corpses hidden in spaces hidden in walls, and a medical torture room way below. After a lot of red herring-adolescent frolic, the film becomes a nightmare, a way of Kale’s working his way out of a load of intolerable guilt for his father’s death: by saving Mom, he will put Dad’s haunting spirit to rest. By ridding the world of Turner, a kind of unwanted surrogate father and the living embodiment of the guilt he associates with his deceased actual father, Kale will free himself from his mental imprisonment for the rest of his life.
This he must do for himself because he is left to do it by himself—although two friends, including the girl who is also a neighbor, have assisted in the adventure.
The film is full of technology, beginning with the electronic ankle bracelet used to monitor Kale during his term of house arrest. Computer, Internet, iPod, Xbox games: all these and other technological things figure into the mise-en-scène. It is all a part of Kale’s world; but the implication arises that such things draw energy away from what ought to be primary: a concern for people. Fittingly, the film ends in a romantic clinch.
Shia LeBeouf, in the lead role, has one great moment, when Kale realizes that his father is dead. The camera is kept on Kale’s face, and the shot haunts. For the rest, LeBeouf is adequate. David Morse is exceptionally creepy as Robert Turner. Shots showing Turner’s oversized face as Turner peers indoors at night through windows, rendering him ghostlike, are the film’s creepiest shots.
But this juvenile reincarnation of Alfred Hitchcock’s gloriously sophisticated Rear Window (1954) quickly becomes infantile. Disturbia, despite a couple of moments of real terror, is not a good movie.
Like this:
This entry was posted on October 3, 2010 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Informal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.