Plot
After his father's death in a car accident, 17-year-old Kale Brecht becomes a troubled outcast. During Spanish class, Señor Gutierrez reprimands Kale for poor performance and mentions his recently deceased father, inciting Kale to attack him. A sympathetic judge sentences Kale to three months house arrest, with an ankle monitor and a proximity sensor.
At the Brecht house, Detective Parker explains how the ankle monitor functions while the overseeing police officer is Señor Gutierrez's cousin. Kale spends his confinement watching television and playing video games, while neglecting household chores. His frustrated mother, Julie, cancels his Xbox Live and iTunes subscription and cuts his TV cord. Bored, Kale observes his neighborhood with binoculars, including solitary neighbor Robert Turner, and also attractive Ashley Carlson, who just moved in next door with her parents. When Kale accidentally trips his proximity sensor chasing pranking neighborhood boys, the police quickly arrive. Officer Gutierrez roughly handcuffs Kale. After receiving a warning, Kale sets up a marked perimeter zone, careful to stay inside.
Late one night, Kale grows suspicious when Turner returns home in his classic Ford Mustang with a dented fender, matching the description of a car mentioned in a TV news report about a serial killer at large. Kale befriends Ashley, and they begin spying on Turner, along with Kale's best friend, Ronnie. When Turner has a woman guest, they later see her frantically running from him inside the house, but later appears to drive away.
Kale becomes jealous when he sees Ashley flirting with popular classmates at her pool party. When he blasts disruptive non-party-related music at them, Ashley arrives and angrily confronts Kale. He reveals his romantic attraction and they kiss.
The following day, Kale has Ashley follow Turner to the supermarket while Ronnie obtains the code to Turner's garage door controller. Turner intercepts Ashley in the parking lot and sternly warns her to stay away. Shaken, Ashley stops helping with the investigation. Ronnie realizes he left his phone in Turner's car and breaks into the garage, with Kale watching from a distance. When Ronnie gets trapped when the garage door closes, Kale tries to rescue him but trips the ankle monitor. The police arrive and search the garage, as Kale accuses Turner of murder. However, they only find a bag containing a roadkill deer.
Julie goes to Turner's house and convinces him not to press charges against Kale. Ronnie, who escaped Turner's house, shows Kale the video he shot while inside. Zooming in on a single frame, Kale sees what looks like a woman's corpse through a heat vent grate. Meanwhile, Turner incapacitates and binds Julie. Turner enters the Brecht's house and knocks out Ronnie with a bat. After binding and gagging Kale, he reveals he will frame Kale for murdering Ronnie and Julie and then committed suicide. However, Ashley arrives, distracting Turner and allowing Kale to club him in the face. Ashley unties Kale's hands and mouth. They jump from the bedroom window into her pool, setting off the ankle monitor and alerting the police.
As Kale frantically searches for Julie inside Turner's house, he finds previous victims' corpses. When Officer Gutierrez arrives, Turner kills him. Kale finds his mother bound and gagged in the cellar. Turner appears, slashes Kale in the back and pins him to a wall. But before Turner can kill Kale, Julie stabs his leg with a screwdriver, allowing Kale to impale Turner with gardening shears.
Following the harrowing events, Kale's ankle bracelet is removed early for good behavior. Kale exacts revenge on the pranking neighborhood kids before kissing Ashley as Ronnie playfully videotapes them.
Production
Development and writing
As Christopher Landon heard an NPR show discussing Martha Stewart being on house arrest, he started thinking on what he would do in a similar condition, "already sort of being a voyeur, I figured that I would just be spying on my neighbors all the time.” He made the protagonist a teenager dealing with his father's death to reflect his own life experiences. [4] [5] Landon wrote a spec script based on that, which ended up sold to The Montecito Picture Company, who brought it into development at DreamWorks Pictures. [6]
Executive producer Steven Spielberg arranged for Shia LaBeouf to be on the casting shortlist for this film because he was impressed by LaBeouf's work on Holes . D. J. Caruso auditioned over a hundred males for the role in five weeks before settling on LaBeouf as he was looking for someone "who guys would really like and respond to, because he wasn't going to be such a pretty boy". LaBeouf was attracted to the role because of Caruso's 2002 film The Salton Sea , which he complimented as one of his favorite films. Before filming started, the two watched the thriller films Rear Window starring James Stewart, Straw Dogs starring Dustin Hoffman, and The Conversation starring Gene Hackman. They also viewed the 1989 romantic film Say Anything... and "mixed all the movies together". [7] LaBeouf says he spoke to people on house arrest and locked himself in a room with the bracelet to feel what the confinement of house arrest is like. [7] He commented in an interview, "...it's hard. I'm not going to say it's harder than jail, but it's tough. House arrest is hard because everything is available. [...] The temptation sucks. That's the torture of it." [7] Caruso gave him the freedom to improvise whenever necessary to make the dialogue appeal to the current generation.
Filming
Disturbia was filmed on location in the cities of Whittier, California and Pasadena, California. Filming took place from January 6, 2006, to April 29, 2006. The homes of Kale and Mr. Turner, which were supposed to be across from each other, were actually located in two different cities. [8]
During filming, LaBeouf began a program that saw him gain twenty five pounds of muscle in preparation for his future films Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull . [9]
According to LaBeouf, David Morse, who plays Mr. Turner, did not speak to LaBeouf or any of the other younger actors while on set. LaBeouf said, "When we finished filming, he was very friendly. But he's a method actor, and as long as we were shooting, he wouldn't say a word to us." [10]
Release
The film was released on DVD and HD DVD on August 7, 2007, and on Blu-ray Disc on March 15, 2008.
In the "Making of Disturbia" section of the DVD's special features section it is revealed that LaBeouf and Morse did not have much contact off-set, so as to make the fight scenes at the end of the movie as realistic as possible.
Lawsuit
The Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust filed a lawsuit against Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks, its parent company Viacom, and Universal Studios on September 5, 2008. [13] [14] The suit alleged that Disturbia infringed on the rights to Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder" (the basis for the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window ), and that DreamWorks never bothered to obtain motion picture rights to the intellectual property and evaded compensating the rights holder for the alleged appropriation. (Ownership of the copyright in Woolrich's original story "It Had to Be Murder" and its use as the basis for the movie Rear Window was previously litigated before the United States Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend , 495 U.S. 207 (1990).) Contrary to some media reports, the claim was based on the original Woolrich short story, not the movie Rear Window.
This claim was rejected by the U.S. District Court in Abend v. Spielberg, 748 F.Supp.2d 200 (S.D.N.Y. 2010), on the basis that the original Woolrich short story and Disturbia are only similar at a high level of generality and abstraction. "Their similarities derive entirely from unprotectible elements and the total look and feel of the works is so distinct that no reasonable trier of fact could find the works substantially similar within the meaning of copyright law." [15] Disturbia contained many subplots not in the original short story. [16] [17]
After the dismissal of the copyright claim in federal court, the Abend Trust filed another lawsuit in California state court against Universal Studios and the Hitchcock Estate on October 28, 2010, for a breach of contract claim based on earlier agreements which allegedly restricted the use of ideas from the original Woolrich short story and the movie Rear Window whether or not the ideas are copyright protectable, that the defendants had entered into with the Abend Trust after the Supreme Court's Stewart v. Abend decision. [18] [19]
Reception
Box office
Disturbia grossed $80.2 million in North America and $37.9 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $118.1 million, against a budget of $20 million. [2]
In the United States and Canada, Disturbia was released alongside Year of the Dog and Pathfinder , and opened first at the box office with $22.2 million. [20] The film remained number one at the box office for the next two weeks, grossing $13 million and $9 million, respectively. [21] [22] In its fourth week, it earned $5.7 million and finished second behind the record-breaking Spider-Man 3 ($151.1 million). [23]
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes , 69% of 175 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.30/10.The website's consensus reads: "Aside from its clichéd resolution, Disturbia is a tense, subtle thriller with a noteworthy performance from Shia LaBeouf." [24] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 62 out of 100 based on reviews from 28 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. [25] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale. [26]
The film earned a "two thumbs up" rating from Richard Roeper and A.O. Scott (filling in for Roger Ebert), with Roeper saying, "This is a cool little thriller with big scares and fine performances." [27] William Thomas of Empire gave it 3 out of 5 stars and wrote: "despite the 'edgy' title, Disturbia is content to be a multiplex-friendly teen thriller with a higher degree of slickness and smarts than most of its contemporaries." [28]
David Denby of The New Yorker judged the film "a travesty", adding: "The dopiness of it, however, may be an indication not so much of cinematic ineptitude as of the changes in a movie culture that was once devoted to adults and is now rather haplessly and redundantly devoted to kids." [29] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave it 2 out of 5 stars, writing: "Despite the interesting set-up, the action degenerates into obvious implausibility and silliness - fatal for a suspense thriller - and boredom sets in." [30]
