Selina Mills

Bad neighbours

Lakeview Terrace<br /> 15, Nationwide Summer<br /> 15, Key Cities

issue 06 December 2008

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.

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