Review: Lakeview Terrace

By Andy Hunsaker, Fancast Movies

The trailer for Lakeview Terrace initially brought to mind the 1992 Ray Liotta film Unlawful Entry [watch the trailer], in which a police officer is slowly revealed to be some kind of obsessive psycho stalker, and Kurt Russell and Madeleine Stowe need to figure out how to survive his escalating creepiness, and that’s the kind of story one might expect when walking into the theater to see this new film - until you see the credit saying that this is a Neil LaBute film.

Neil LaBute. The guy who made the emotionally brutal films The Shape of Things, In The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. And projects as weird as Nurse Betty. This alone should put you in a different frame of mind as far as your expectations for what Lakeview Terrace will actually be.

It’s no bargain-basement thriller, although it hits a lot of the expected beats in its tale of an interracial couple, Lisa and Chris Mattson (Kerry Washington, Patrick Wilson), moving into a fancy Los Angeles suburb only to discover that their neighbor Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) is not only a hyper-protective cop, but one who seems to harbor a personal grudge against the two of them as soon as they meet. Abel is raising two kids by himself after the loss of his wife, and he’s as strict with them as he would be with the perps he arrests. After a few awkward initial encounters, it becomes apparent that Abel has a problem with a white man being with a black woman… but it’s not just a matter of simple racism.

Lisa and Chris aren’t completely innocent either, as one of the main things that sets Abel off is the fact that they had sex in their backyard in full view of his kids, but there’s more than simple parental outrage to that aspect, too. Abel Turner is not your run-of-the-mill movie psycho who gives creepy stares and stands around looking unhinged. He’s an old cop who never bothered to try and make detective, with a spotty disciplinary record and a chip on his shoulder, with some deep-rooted anger that he can’t find release for, and the Mattsons provide an unhealthy focus for it. He treats them with this constant look of contempt even when he’s saying the words that a friendly neighbor might say. The ever-looming specter of the Southern California wildfires encroaching on their neighborhood contributes to the very subtle build of tension that’s occasionally deflated and recharged by Abel seemingly realizing that he’s stepping over the line from time to time, only to find his frustrations to be insurmountable.

Even though it ends somewhat like your by-the-numbers thriller would, there’s a spin on it that casts a harsh light on Chris just as much as it does Abel. It’s not some break with reality that turns Abel into a killer, but rather one of his dirty harassment maneuvers going awry that forces him into it to try and cover his own tracks. The film never takes the easy out, and it’s a much better film than it has a right to be because of it. It’s not a great film, because there’s only so much dickhead neighbor malarkey you can set to tense music before it just comes across as suburban idiocy. Yet it manages to be pretty consistently compelling because you are watching a great, enigmatic performance from Samuel L. Jackson while constantly waiting for that ticking time bomb behind his eyes to go off. Even though LaBute never gives the audience exactly what it wants, what it gets is nevertheless an interesting piece of work.