"Don't Breathe" Review

From the creative team behind 2013's remake of Evil Dead comes the most brutal, most intense, and most original American horror film in at least a decade. In fact, writer/director Fede Alvarez's Don't Breathe will leave you just that - breathless.

The premise of Don't Breathe is something of a reverse-home invasion thriller. We open on three young burglars - Money (Daniel Zovatto), Rocky (Jane Levy) and Alex (Dylan Minnette) - casing the empty house of a wealthy family on holiday. Hungry for a bigger score, the group sets their sights on a seemingly easy target - a blind man (Stephen Lang) living in the last occupied house in a decrepit neighborhood. Word is that the blind man is sitting on a $300,000 legal settlement which is stored in cash somewhere inside the house. However, the thieves underestimate the measure of a man with everything to lose.

The film has so many refreshingly unexpected twists, and they all generally work. Just when you think you know what's coming, something else comes totally out of left field. Oftentimes when writers try to insert this many plot or character twists, they jumble things up too much and ultimately fall flat. It's a feat in and of itself that Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues pull the rug out from under us this many times, and the film never loses steam. This is a lean, mean picture with little to no extraneous detail to distract from the story at hand.

Acting performances are strong with Levy and Lang shining brightest. Levy is well on her way to becoming one of the next great "scream queens." Although his character arc ultimately hinges on a few far-fetched circumstances, Lang hands in a positively chilling tun as the Blind Man.

The cinematography is also very well done. There's a scene where Alex and Rocky find themselves trapped in total darkness; the Blind Man thus forcing them to "see what he sees." The visuals this scene is executed with are something akin to night vision, but the shot isn't glowing green. The gradient turns, essentially, black & white, which makes the facial expressions of the terrified actors somewhat horrifying themselves.

As cool as the acting and cinematography are, those aren't my favorite things about this movie. As a horror movie fan, it's easy to feel jaded. Once you've experienced the graphic atrocities of Cannibal Holocaust and the disturbing, supernatural dreamscapes of The Shining, it's all sort of downhill from there in a way. There are things that happen in Don't Breathe that made me believe in American horror movies again. Brutal, nasty, unsettling things the likes of which haven't been seen in a mainstream release in years. Words cannot express how delighted I am that this movie is getting a general release in theaters nationwide. Outside of the indie scene, horror has been dominated by sequels and reboots. The genre needs a movie like Don't Breathe now more than ever to haunt the hearts and minds of genre fans everywhere. I think we're going to be discussing, watching and remembering this one for a long, long time. 

A-