Bad neighbours

Lakeview Terrace
15, Nationwide

Summer
15, Key Cities

Lakeview Terrace is one of those menacing, neighbour-from-hell type thrillers with Samuel L. Jackson playing Abel Turner, an LAPD cop who bristles with hostility from the moment Chris and Lisa, an interracial couple — he’s white, she’s black — move in next door. This is a movie that inverts Hollywood’s usual racism shtick as, here, the bitter racist is the white-hating black rather than the black-hating white, although why any black might hate a white beats the hell out of me. I’m white and quite lovely. Ask anyone.

Anyway, the film opens with Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson) and his wife, Lisa (Kerry Washington), moving into their new house: their first house, a perfect house in a perfect LA suburb, high in the hills. They are happy. They are in love. They kiss a lot and repeatedly say ‘love you, honey’ in the way film couples do when they are about to get walloped. There, that’ll take the smiles off your faces. Meanwhile, next door, we see Abel, a widower, having breakfast with his two young kids and sending his son to change his shirt. ‘Why?’ asks the daughter. ‘What’s the rule?’ asks Abel. ‘I don’t know, you got so many,’ she says. ‘Have so many,’ he corrects. ‘Have so many.’ So we know he runs a tight, authoritarian, illiberal ship, is in command of his home just as, come to think of it, Jackson is in absolute command of this film. In fact, Jackson is this film, powering it along with his own, particular, muscular presence and that thing he can do; that thing where he can go from innocently playful to downright wicked on the turn of a sixpence and still be utterly and brilliantly believable.