Disturbia (2007)

Disturbia arrives from 2007, a year when a studio thriller could still be assembled from borrowed parts and released without apology. The parts here are Rear Window, a court-ordered ankle bracelet, and the ambient paranoia of a suburban street after dark. Kale Brecht loses his father in a car crash, assaults a Spanish teacher, and is confined to a hundred-foot perimeter, where he fills the hours with binoculars and a growing suspicion that the neighbor across the way owns a dented fender and a cellar full of secrets. The film has no interest in telling us anything. It wants to frighten us for ninety minutes and then send us home.

The casting is agreeable without being argumentative. Viola Davis appears as an investigating detective with a handful of scenes and no thesis attached, and Aaron Yoo handles the best-friend duties with the easy competence the role requires. Neither presence is remarked upon, which is the correct approach and also the reason the film registers so faintly on the cultural seismograph. Sarah Roemer's Ashley exists chiefly to be kissed and to arrive at the right moment, though she does distract the killer long enough for Kale to swing a club, and Julie eventually drives a screwdriver into a leg. Two gestures of competence in a hundred minutes. We record them and move on.

No message waits at the end of this corridor. The mother cancels the Xbox Live subscription, and that is the full extent of the film's economic thought. The villain is a man with a Mustang, not a system. Grief and withdrawal are treated as delinquency, which is the genre's habit, and the screenplay never pauses to instruct anyone about anything. What remains is a competent, well-lit suspense machine that opened at number one and returned its budget several times over, and which will be remembered mostly as the thing a trust once sued Steven Spielberg over. We classify it accordingly and return it to the shelf.

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