Arriving in theatres at a time when Hollywood movies are increasingly likely to deliver even less than they appear to offer, Lakeview Terrace is something of a Trojan horse. Though it looks like a mainstream thriller — an impression reinforced by posters featuring Samuel L. Jackson’s menacing glare and trailers promising a satisfactory degree of guns and ammo — the movie has a larger scope than most of its brethren. And despite its hot-button, high-concept premise about a cop’s hostility toward the mixed-race couple who moves in next door, it’s ultimately less occupied with matters of pigmentation than class and socio-economic divisions in contemporary Los Angeles, as well as even thornier questions about power and gender dynamics.

In that respect, Lakeview Terrace is not what audiences will expect, though it probably counts as a happier sort of discovery than director Neil LaBute’s last outing, a hilariously wrong-headed remake of The Wicker Man. Here, the filmmaker and playwright behind In the Company of Men and Nurse Betty takes a step back toward respectability with a movie that courageously (if not consistently) subverts its trappings as a formulaic thriller. It stars Little Children’s Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington as a yuppie couple who get into a nasty war with Jackson as their neighbour, an LAPD hard-ass named Abel Turner.

As LaBute says during an interview in Toronto last month, sneaking some meatier matters into the movie was very much his intention. It was also one that didn’t trouble the studio releasing Lakeview Terrace, the Sony subsidiary Screen Gems. “We had no qualms about making a thriller and we made it the best we could make it,” says LaBute. “And the people at Screen Gems were happy to look at it and find a lot of drama in it, too. You watch the trailer and it looks like it’s a thriller — they know what they’re selling. And the hope is the audience goes, ‘Oh, there was also some other shit in there — that’s a surprise.’”

It’s a surprise we may see more of, considering the studios’ increasing lack of interest in projects that don’t involve super­heroes and the recent demise of many of the mini-majors that tended to green-light dramatic projects by directors like LaBute.

“It’s amazing how quickly some of these places that you normally go to and work with are closing,” he says. And since “the number of places that are willing to do these kinds of movies is getting smaller and smaller,” maybe it’s not so strange that LaBute is adapting his aesthetic (which often involves people doing dastardly things to each other) to genre pieces. Lakeview Terrace’s most provocative points rise naturally from its premise.

“We could talk about race without having to stop and talk about race,” he says. “It’s shrewdly in there already. And we can talk about gender politics, which I’m sure is one of the reasons Screen Gems brought me in as opposed to telling me, ‘We love your thrillers!’ because I haven’t done one. I think it was a manageable enough thriller for them to say, ‘This will work but we know you can deal with the actors and the dramatic aspects and therefore there’ll be more than exists on the page.’ We were always trying to find out what else was there rather than asking how we could keep ratcheting up the tension.”

There’s also a refreshing disinclination to treat Jackson’s character as a straight-up villain tormenting the nice, better-dressed types with whom viewers are encouraged to identify in so many other yuppies-in-peril thrillers. In one of Lakeview Terrace’s most bracing scenes, he un-gingerly reminds the couple’s oh-so-liberal party guests that it is men like him who ultimately protect them from the city’s less desirable elements, not “the nice police.”

He has a point, LaBute says, “and whether you take the point or not, that kind of thing always made him more complex. It always made him more of a human being who is making choices, not just this bad guy or monster. He doesn’t do all this with glee. There’s not the kind of malice or cruelty you might have seen in the first movie I did [In the Company of Men]. The violence escalates because of the kind of person he is. He’s 50-some, he’s black and he’s a cop and he demands a certain level of respect and he won’t back down. That’s his tragedy — he’s got pride to a fault.”

Even though Lakeview Terrace’s penchant for moral and ethical ambiguities fails to freshen up its more familiar aspects — the climactic scenes are nearly as overwrought as the Chernobyl-sized meltdown that made LaBute’s Wicker Man such a guilty pleasure — the movie does inspire the hope that more studio thrillers will take a wider view of the world. “There’ll be many Lakeviews to come if it makes any money,” says LaBute with a laugh. “Screen Gems will be happy to bring you more versions of it!”

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