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#361 - Don't Breathe
Fede Alvarez, 2016
Three young burglars break into the home of a blind veteran only for the veteran to fight back.
If there's an issue I have with judging certain horror films, it's that I do have some trouble trying to parse whether the discomfort a given film inspires is because of a successfully scary execution or a repulsed reaction to something that is poorly-made and disagreeable. In the case of a film like Don't Breathe, it could very well be both. A similar feeling came about when I watched Fede Alvarez's previous feature, the 2013 remake of Sam Raimi's notorious horror classic The Evil Dead. While I'd say that I liked it, it's not especially great in its own right. At the very least, I was intrigued enough to see what Alvarez would do next and the simplistic premise of Don't Breathe certainly has its fair share of potential. The concept of three very different burglars getting more than they bargained for when their supposedly easy target proves surprisingly dangerous should be enough to sustain a lean little feature, especially one that can use the subverted power dynamics on display to give an already-unsettling horror movie some solid texture.
Unfortunately, this isn't really the case with Don't Breathe. After beginning with a cold open that rivals the one in Alvarez's Evil Dead in terms of redundancy, we are introduced to our lead characters - a desperate young woman (Jane Levy), her thuggish boyfriend (Daniel Zovatto) and her nervous male friend (Dylan Minnette). They eke out a meagre living by pulling off low-level burglaries, all of them dreaming of a better life in one way or another; Levy and Zovatto want to escape from their dreary Detroit lives to the sun-'n'-surf of California while Minnette is motivated by an unrequited affection for Levy. Their opportunity soon comes in the form of what should be a lucrative but easy last score - an old blind man (Stephen Lang) who lives in a rundown house yet is apparently hiding a large cash settlement following his daughter's death by vehicular manslaughter. Of course, things don't pan out quite as well once the trio begin their home invasion; the blind man is an Army veteran who is not going to take their intrusion lightly, plus his blindness has only sharpened his other senses to the point where he can track them with relative ease. It's a sound premise on paper, but ironically it results in a horror movie that actually suffers for trying too much to be too horrifying.
To give credit where credit's due, Don't Breathe has got some decent qualities about it. Though his character does spend much of the time being a fairly standard horror-movie boogeyman, Lang has a considerable amount of screen presence that goes some way towards distinguishing his character even in the face of some patently absurd developments (which I won't spoil but am still not sure are actually effective or end up undermining the film by compromising its already-grey morality). There's also something to be said for Pedro Luque's cinematography, which does rely on a very pronounced orange-and-teal palette but has the odd flourish that would be necessary to make the claustrophobic setting really stand out (the most notable instance being a stage-setting long take). Beyond that, the film doesn't make the most of its premise as it stumbles from one scene to the next and soon squanders any momentum it may have earned. By the time the film reached the one-hour mark, I was ready for it to just be over because of tedium more so than tension. Don't Breathe doesn't completely lack for scares or thrills, but it's hard not to feel like it really wasted a lot of its potential in terms of being both a resonant film (especially given its apparent socioeconomic subtext) and a visceral horror experience (which doesn't handle its blind antagonist particularly well). As a result, any attempts at building character and atmosphere are seemingly abandoned halfway through and result in the film providing a weird combination of apathy towards the characters and repulsion towards the action.
Fede Alvarez, 2016
Three young burglars break into the home of a blind veteran only for the veteran to fight back.
If there's an issue I have with judging certain horror films, it's that I do have some trouble trying to parse whether the discomfort a given film inspires is because of a successfully scary execution or a repulsed reaction to something that is poorly-made and disagreeable. In the case of a film like Don't Breathe, it could very well be both. A similar feeling came about when I watched Fede Alvarez's previous feature, the 2013 remake of Sam Raimi's notorious horror classic The Evil Dead. While I'd say that I liked it, it's not especially great in its own right. At the very least, I was intrigued enough to see what Alvarez would do next and the simplistic premise of Don't Breathe certainly has its fair share of potential. The concept of three very different burglars getting more than they bargained for when their supposedly easy target proves surprisingly dangerous should be enough to sustain a lean little feature, especially one that can use the subverted power dynamics on display to give an already-unsettling horror movie some solid texture.
Unfortunately, this isn't really the case with Don't Breathe. After beginning with a cold open that rivals the one in Alvarez's Evil Dead in terms of redundancy, we are introduced to our lead characters - a desperate young woman (Jane Levy), her thuggish boyfriend (Daniel Zovatto) and her nervous male friend (Dylan Minnette). They eke out a meagre living by pulling off low-level burglaries, all of them dreaming of a better life in one way or another; Levy and Zovatto want to escape from their dreary Detroit lives to the sun-'n'-surf of California while Minnette is motivated by an unrequited affection for Levy. Their opportunity soon comes in the form of what should be a lucrative but easy last score - an old blind man (Stephen Lang) who lives in a rundown house yet is apparently hiding a large cash settlement following his daughter's death by vehicular manslaughter. Of course, things don't pan out quite as well once the trio begin their home invasion; the blind man is an Army veteran who is not going to take their intrusion lightly, plus his blindness has only sharpened his other senses to the point where he can track them with relative ease. It's a sound premise on paper, but ironically it results in a horror movie that actually suffers for trying too much to be too horrifying.
To give credit where credit's due, Don't Breathe has got some decent qualities about it. Though his character does spend much of the time being a fairly standard horror-movie boogeyman, Lang has a considerable amount of screen presence that goes some way towards distinguishing his character even in the face of some patently absurd developments (which I won't spoil but am still not sure are actually effective or end up undermining the film by compromising its already-grey morality). There's also something to be said for Pedro Luque's cinematography, which does rely on a very pronounced orange-and-teal palette but has the odd flourish that would be necessary to make the claustrophobic setting really stand out (the most notable instance being a stage-setting long take). Beyond that, the film doesn't make the most of its premise as it stumbles from one scene to the next and soon squanders any momentum it may have earned. By the time the film reached the one-hour mark, I was ready for it to just be over because of tedium more so than tension. Don't Breathe doesn't completely lack for scares or thrills, but it's hard not to feel like it really wasted a lot of its potential in terms of being both a resonant film (especially given its apparent socioeconomic subtext) and a visceral horror experience (which doesn't handle its blind antagonist particularly well). As a result, any attempts at building character and atmosphere are seemingly abandoned halfway through and result in the film providing a weird combination of apathy towards the characters and repulsion towards the action.