disturbia

This movie is a rip-off of Rear Window, the 1954 Hitchcock classic.

What’s interesting here is the choice to recreate this story with hot young things, as opposed to the aging characters in the original. James Stewart’s L.B. Jefferies watched the fears and frustrations in his own head played out by his neighbors, as he remained a prisoner in his bedroom due to his broken leg. Those fears related to his midlife crisis and his relationship to Grace Kelly’s Lisa Fremont.

It mattered (a lot) that Stewart and Kelly were already household names, and no longer spring chickens. A generation that had grown up watching Stewart as a spry and pro-active leading man in many films empathized immediately with his frustration at having to recline in one place for almost two hours. Early on, we see his quivering saggy chest as he’s lowered onto his bed. The viewer feels awful for him: a good man, once young, virile, and fearless, rendered helpless by chance, age, and time.

With disturbia, we have Shia LaBeouf (who, to be fair, has received plenty of critical praise in his short career) as a lusty teenage boy with a court-mandated ankle monitor. So instead of being asked to feel the frustration of impotence brought by time on an aging and accomplished man who just wants to do the right thing, we’re asked to feel the frustration of impotence brought by the government on a boy who just wants to fuck the neighbor (well, okay, and also do the right thing).

It would be nice to suppose that disturbia is a profound and refreshing take on the Rear Window concept,
and that soon it will be showered with praise from critics who discuss the significance of the fact that the protagonist is named Brecht. In that case, this trailer is a marketing mistake, because it caters mostly to people who want to find out whether the hero fucks the girl. Such things do happen, when (for example) the studio doesn’t have confidence in the material.

It’s also possible that this is really just a run-of-the mill slasher movie, where teenage sexuality is rewarded by death, with a classic story’s skeleton put in place merely to give shape to the otherwise flimsy material.

disturbia trailer