A man begins to suspect his neighbors are not what they appear to be, and their secrets could be deadly in this taut thriller. Michael Faraday (played by Jeff Bridges) is a college professor whose wife, an FBI agent, was killed in the line of duty by members of an extremist right-wing terrorist group, leaving him to raise their 9-year-old son by himself. One day, he saves the life of a boy he sees on the street. The child turns out to be the son of his new neighbors, Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack). The grateful Langs soon become friendly with Michael, who seem about as cheerfully bland as anyone could hope from a denizen of suburbia. However, the better Michael gets to know Oliver, the more he's convinced something isn't quite right; he seems almost too clean and perfect, and he begins noticing small details in Oliver's stories don't quite add up. The question, is Michael's well-founded paranoia about the radical right getting the better of him, or are the Langs up to something a lot more sinister than their cheerful smiles and manicured lawn would suggest? Ehren Kruger's screenplay for Arlington Road won the Motion Picture Academy's Nicholl Fellowship prize in 1996; the film was the second directorial effort for Mark Pellington, who debuted with Going All The Way.