Hitchcock for the Hip Set
Disturbia Updates Rear Window with Satisfying Results

With all the remakes of movies that have been produced by Hollywood over the past decade, it is surprising that the oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock has not been plucked as clean as the eye sockets of some poor victim of his thriller The Birds. There was that useless, frame-for-frame color recreation of Psycho, starring Vince Vaughn a few years back, but that really doesn’t count.

Hedge trimmers and horror. Shia LaBeouf stars in the new thriller Disturbia.

With Hollywood’s obsession with copycat success, why hadn’t anyone tried to remake the great Hitchcock classics?

Perhaps that is the question the makers of the new film Disturbia asked themselves shortly before coming up with the idea to use Hitchcock’s Rear Window as the jumping off point for their modern teen-scream thriller. For the most part, they do Old Alfred proud with a new movie that has excellent pacing and true suspense before it devolves into standard 21st century murder-and-revenge fare in the last 15 minutes.

Disturbia stars young actor Shia LaBeouf as Kale, a high school kid who has a most idyllic life until he is behind the wheel of the family SUV when it gets into a terrible wreck, killing his father. Unable to shake off his guilt for the accident, Kale falls into a teenage funk that culminates in him taking a swing at his Spanish teacher’s face. The judge finds Kale guilty of assault and sentences him to 90 days house arrest, complete with an ankle bracelet that will alert the cops if he strays more than 100 feet from the center of his house.

Out of sheer boredom, Kale picks up some binoculars and begins spying on his neighbors, much in the same way Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound character did in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Two things immediately grab Kale’s interest: a hot new teenage girl named Ashley (Sarah Roemer) who moved in with her family on one side of his house, and the mysterious loner Robert Turner (David Morse) who never seems to entertain the same lady friend twice, who lives on the other side of Kale’s house.

When Kale starts to believe that there is a connection between Turner’s secretive behavior and news reports of missing women, his spying on his neighbor becomes obsessive. Director D.J. Caruso perfectly exploits the audience’s thrill of being part of Kale’s spying ring while also letting it stew awhile and decide for itself whether Turner is an elusive murderer or innocent neighbor caught up in three teenagers’ imaginations.

“Because I’m a filmmaker, I am in constant voyeur mode, whether I’m listening to a conversation or in a supermarket shopping,” said Caruso. “So this project, for me, was a catharsis of sorts. It felt good doing this because, basically, I feel that my whole life I’ve been watching and spying and capturing little moments between actors. So, in a way, I was able to put myself in Kale’s shoes, look over his shoulder and play out these voyeuristic fantasies in my mind, both as a filmmaker and as an audience member.”

One of the keys to the movie is the casting of LaBeouf, a kid so ordinary-looking that his acting chops take you by surprise. His conflicted and confused demeanor comes across as any sulky kid who has more on his plate than he knows how to handle, but he never loses his likeability or his connection with the audience. The same is true for Morse who never tips his hand on whether he is a murderous monster or just a loner who wants his privacy.

Most of the other roles in Disturbia are disposable and for the most part are played as such. Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity from the Matrix series) is unspectacular as Kale’s mom Julie, as is Roemer and Aaron Yoo who plays Kale’s spying buddy Ronnie. Still, they do nothing to distract from the overall suspense of the film.

Disturbia is head and shoulders above similar-themed films such as The Messengers in that it relies on realism and suspense to pull the viewer in as opposed to cheap (and loud) frights. Now that one director has made a successful movie based (at least partially) on a Hitchcock film, it will be interesting to see if it becomes a trend.

Disturbia is rated PG-13 for sequences of terror and violence and for some sensuality.