Don’t Breathe – Film Review by David Turpin

Director: Fede Alvarez
Writers: Fede Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues
Stars: Stephen Lang, Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette

Following his splatter-heavy 2013 remake of Evil Dead, director Fede Alvarez continues his association with producer Sam Raimi, but delivers a slyer, (somewhat) less outré second feature.  Don’t Breathe reunites Alvarez with his appealing Evil Dead lead, Jane Levy, who plays one of a trio of young would-be burglars (the others being Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto).  The gang – for various reasons – decide to rob the house of an unnamed Blind Man (Stephen Lang), a former veteran who apparently has a massive pile of cash squirreled away after a court settlement.  Naturally, things do not go to plan, and the Blind Man turns out to be a more than worthy opponent for the sticky-fingered youths.  To reveal more would be unfair – not least because, in terms of plot, that’s pretty much it.  With all the best quick-and-nasty horror films, of course, the proof of the pudding is more to do with how the one-line premise is milked for 80 minutes.  Don’t Breathe isn’t quite on the top shelf of this disreputable genre, but it comes close enough to justify clutching the arm-rests at a late-night show.

The film’s best moments wring tension from the geography of the house – most particularly a fiendish sequence involving a glass conservatory roof.  In these scenes, Don’t Breathe evokes an agreeably down-market reworking of David Fincher’s Panic Room – one free to indulge impulses that would never be possible in a more “prestigious” production.  There is a certain Hitchcockian flair to Alvarez’s combination of concrete spatial sense and flights of sadistic imagination, but as the perverse twists accumulate, the setting occasionally resembles the meticulously mapped-out, yet still darkly cartoonish, interiors of Jeunet and Caro.

The problem with the film is that its suspense derives less from concern about the fates of the characters than it does from an intellectual curiosity about how Alvarez (and co-writer Rodo Sayagues) will be able to keep their claustrophobic conceit going.  Hence, while the action never stalls, it never really builds up a head of steam.  Once the trap is in motion for our heroes, the rest of the film unfolds on a kind of plateau, with the excitement never dipping, but never mounting.  A would-be outrageous twist that materialises in the latter third of the film ultimately adds nothing but a few icky details, leaving the stakes precisely as they were before it was unveiled.  Don’t Breathe never reaches the heights of giddy invention that blessed the summer’s earlier confined-space shocker, Jaume Collet-Sera’s The Shallows.  While Don’t Breathe offers more viscera, it never approaches the “flaming shark” moment of Collet-Sera’s film, at which the film let go of all pretentions to realism and ascended to the giddy heights of drive-in nirvana.

For all that, Don’t Breathe is a taut, well-played and smoothly assembled entertainment – and its willingness to “go there” in its gory money-shots will probably fool some viewers into thinking it more daring, and more frightening, than it is.  As an early autumn programmer for horror fans, it will be Manna from heaven.  Just don’t expect to remember too much about it by the time the sequel rolls around.