Nice mix of lighter and darker aspects makes this competent enough

Rating: 8/10 (8 June 2019)

DJ Caruso has made one or two big films, but here he is back in 2007 making an early contact with a still-youthful but certainly competent Shia LaBeouf playing a kid disturbed into violence and anti-social tendences and general wasting by the death of his father in a car accident. A measure of sympathy from the Judge over the misdemeanours perpetrated by Kale (yes he is named after cabbage, for some reason) leads to a situation in which he is tagged and left under house arrest.
It's fun to see how he tries to adjust to this, but the more-fastidious viewer is going to suffer greatly from the mess and chaos into which his premises descend rapidly. It all looks rather like lightish teen fare at this point, and all the more so as a family with a daughter more or less Kale's age moves in next door. She's Ashley (played by an extremely lovely Sarah Roemer), and there's many a guilty film-watcher out here who might sympathise just a little with the anyway-awkward-and-now-housebound, bored-out-of-his-skull Kale, for finding it impossible to leave the binoculars alone under such circumstances!
As we know, voyeurs always see something they don't want to in the end, and this movie is no exception. But it's one heck of a vicariously-enjoyed, wish-fulfilling twist in the meantime when Ashley does not write Kale off as a perverted loser when she finally meets him, but rather flirts just a little, and even joins in with the spying on the neighbours engaged in by Kale and his friend Ronnie (well done by Aaron Yoo). Implausible as it may be, this plot twist is GLORIOUS, and the chemistry and then love that blooms between the unlikely pair will be a delight for many a viewer in a kind of sighing "if only" sort of way.
The fact that one of the neighbours is doing something really nasty comes as no real surprise here, and the tension ratchets up in more or less predictable fashion; but it lurches into quite-satisfying if grisly surrealism when we finally get to see (albeit only impressionistically) the house conversions that Mr Turner (played by David Morse) has carried out to better allow for his sick psychopathic interests. At that point, an ordinary house seems to have corridors and basements that go on for miles, including an unexplained pool of water existing below it all!
Mostly, this film under Caruso knows how to mix its laughs, thrills, lighter and darker sides, so it's no surprise that some comparisons with Hitchcock have been made. Nothing too terrible gets seen, yet the atmosphere is certainly disturbing, as the title suggests. Of course, in the end "Disturbia" is nothing too special, but certainly not a waste of time either, and it's quite clear why it made itself a reasonable profit on a relatively modest outlay as on the whole it's well enough done.