LAKEVIEW TERRACE

Uncomfortable. That was the prevailing theme all through this new thriller from director Neil LaBute, himself no stranger to putting unsettling stories on the screen (In the Company of Men, anyone?).

But, in the case of Lakeview Terrace, the tense, squirming-in-your-seat atmosphere is perfect, and the resulting effect takes what could be a seriously awful premise and makes it kind of fun to experience.

Samuel L. Jackson stars as LAPD officer Abel Turner, a dedicated cop and stern but loving single father to two kids – teenager Celia (Regine Nehy) and pre-teen Marcus (Jaishon Fisher) – who lives in an upscale enclave in the hills about the troubled city he patrols. The neighborhood is idyllic, and Abel seems to be an affable guy who’s concerned with keeping things in order. But a different side to him begins to emerge when young married couple Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington) move in directly next door. Abel is immediately peeved by their interracial relationship, but it’s a few careless errors on Chris’s part – like flicking a cigarette butt into Abel’s garden – that set the wheels of Abel’s simmering resentment in motion.

Before long, his passive-aggressive approach becomes outright aggressive – he wants Chris and Lisa out of the area in no uncertain terms, and begins tormenting them. Thing is, because he’s a cop with more than two decades under his belt, the young couple are fairly powerless to get any kind of support from the force and are soon left to their own devices in a neighbor feud to rival the Hatfields and McCoys.

Lakeview Terrace does a superb job of ratcheting up the tension ever so slowly. Admittedly, it starts out tense pretty much from the get-go, but with each offhand comment or sinister glare, the audience can feel the foreshadowing of something seriously unpleasant to come. Jackson does a nice job of carefully balancing his character so that, at the outset, he actually seems like a good guy whose motives are completely relatable  – he cares about his kids, his house, his neighbors, his job. For a while, I actually sided with him and (mistakenly) believed that the filmmakers had leaned too far in that direction. But his seemingly understandable stance in the film’s first half makes his transition to myopic sociopath in the latter half that much more effective. It helps that he’s matched, step for step, by Wilson, whose character also moves from passive and apologetic to defensive and determined. The two actors play well off each other, and their chemistry – though adversarial – works wonderfully.

There are flaws in the film, though, not the least of which is the complete lack of presence of anyone else in the neighborhood. Oh, there are neighbors, and they appear occasionally, but it felt inauthentic that not a single one of them would have ever had a problem with Abel before – so as to offer some kind of cryptic warning to early in the film, like, “Be careful. Abel likes things a certain way...” – or that none would, say, notice when Abel throws a deafening, obnoxious party at 3am. Really? Chris and Lisa are the only people to be bothered by Abel’s antics?

And the filmmakers kind of undermine their own story by, late in the film, seeming to justify all of Abel’s behavior with a throwaway story about A Tragic Incident From His Past. It seemed like a lame attempt at helping the audience sympathize with him when, really, it was unnecessary. Better to have left that out, so that it becomes more about, say, social commentary than making sure to give a specific (and kind of clichéd) reason for one man’s mission to get his own way.

But, again, Lakeview is an entertaining ride. The packed audience at the film twittered in nervous anticipation multiple times throughout, and I, for one, found myself wincing from the ever-increasing level of tension. If nothing else, the movie serves as a great cautionary tale... and one that will have audiences thinking twice about pissing off the folks next door.