It's Rear Window for the YouTube generation: sentenced to three months house arrest, kind hearted delinquent Kale (Shia LaBeouf) discovers that the best reality TV has nothing at all to do with TV and spies on his neighbours until his peepers practically bleed from voyeurism. 

Disturbia's poster shows Kale peering through a pair of binoculars accentuated by blood-red lenses, a sign that whatever he's observing is something ominous - like, for example, David Morse as a next-door neighbour.  Just as Jimmy Stewart gasped murder from his wheelchair across the street, Kale cries wolf, but is Mr. Turner (Morse) from the Jack Torrance school of axe-wielding psychopaths or just some slightly creepy bozo who forgets to close the blinds? Director D.J. Caruso's murderer-next-door-maybe multiplex thriller will make an especially good hoot for audiences close to demographic because Caruso and writers Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth latch onto the key concepts of growing up as a teen in suburbia: the girl next door, the new family on the block, the loyal best friend, brushes with authority, troubles with mum, and, at the very core of Disturbia's premise, that lonely island of adolescent incarceration - being grounded.

Brick mingled the high school setting with film noir, and Disturbia, though not as stylised or as ambitious, mingles teenage angst with the (mostly) single setting thriller for a round of watered down Hitchcock filtered through a Dawson's Creek-deep lens.  And, though predictable and checklist faithful to genre conventions, it works.  Considering the energy expended by the director and writers - coupled with the poster tagline "every killer lives next-door to someone" - it isn't difficult to guess which way (Morse as a victim or villain?) the story might be heading, but it's good fun to be taken along for the ride. Even old Hitch himself would surely describe this one as a movie that - however meekly - successfully tweaks the strings of suspense.

With a black electronic tracker attached to his leg (punishment for clocking his Spanish teacher) Kale can't stray from his home for more than 10 seconds. If he does, cranky cops very quickly arrive reaching for their holsters and demanding answers. Kale pegs lengths of rope around the house to define his parameters, and early on you just know that later he'll be desperate to summon the cops by escaping them. It's a cool concept, effective in keeping the protagonist both stranded and on the move, relegating him to a space that is - for precisely the same reason - both a haunting and a blessing.

Film crit classes could have a lot of fun spinning interpretations: Disturbia as an allegory for hidden menaces underneath the paint job of white picket idealism; the struggle for a boy to reconcile the loss of his dad; a salute to the adage "it's not paranoia if they're really after you;" even a crass endorsement of consumerism and the indiscriminate splendour of modern surveillance and communication gadgets. Video phones, i-pods, computers and camcorders are playfully integrated into the plot. This is a movie that basks in gizmos and contemporary technological culture - even down to the last words of dialogue, which are "YouTube."

There are plot holes, logic breakers, bung dialogue and Kale's redundant love interest Ashley (Sarah Roemer) who is hurled recklessly about at the script's convenience; from champion to naysayer in a flash, and she doesn't even have a decent stake in the grand finale. But approach Disturbia as a fluffy remake of Rear Window and you shouldn't be disappointed.

Review by Luke Buckmaster