A few years ago, Neil LaBute sold his brains, as well as his soul, to the highest bidder (if you don’t believe me, watch his Wicker Man remake). This sharp, atmospheric thriller suggests he has wangled those precious commodities back. Happily, it’s not only a return to form for the one-time Mormon and agent provocateur — it’s as good, if not better, than his debut In the Company of Men — it also offers Samuel L Jackson his first decent part in years.

The story, set in the suburbs of LA, has Jackson as Abel Turner, a bright, bigoted cop who enjoys working in a corrupt and miserable cesspool as it makes him feel superior. What he fears is chaos, and his new neighbours, Chris (Patrick Wilson), who is white, and Lisa (Kerry Washington), black, represent chaos.

It turns out that Abel has a particular reason for hating inter-racial relationships, but Jackson’s performance and the writing are so good that his behaviour immediately makes sense. He starts out with a few petty, if witty, digs at Chris. He lambasts him for listening to rap: “You can listen to that all night. You’re still going to be white in the morning!”

He implies that Chris isn’t man enough for Lisa. He also messes with the couple’s air-conditioner — it’s hot and, thanks to the forest fires raging in the hills, getting hotter all the time. He slashes their tyres. Who are they going to call? The cops?

Wilson, so brilliantly spineless in the indie-hit Little Children, again proves he’s more than a pretty face. His Chris is both weaselly and warm; dumb enough to have friends with trophy Asian girlfriends, smart enough to realise that Abel is a fascist. Meanwhile, Washington fleshes out a character — the spoilt daddy’s girl — that could have been two-dimensional.

Chris and Lisa are a decent couple. We identify with them, even as we realise that their decency is based on very little. The world has been good to them, no wonder they like it back.

What we’re in the midst of is a class, race and sex war. And for the first three-quarters of the movie, all the explosions feel organic. Then things get a bit less plausible. The liberal bureaucrats who want to push Abel out of the LAPD and the camcorder tape that he hopes will make Chris look like a love-rat are a bit creaky, as is the climax.

But the character of Abel Turner is so powerful that he rises above such silliness. You can imagine him drawling: “The director is a white guy. The film is aimed at white guys. What did you expect would happen in the end?”