DON'T BREATHE review

I grew up watching horror movies. My mom was a huge fan of slasher flicks like NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, FRIDAY THE 13TH, and her favorite, HALLOWEEN. After I saw POLTERGEIST (against my mom’s wishes) when I was about 5-years-old (thank you, older sis) and didn’t have any nightmares, my felt it was OK to let me delve into the horror genre a little deeper. The way she saw it, as long as I know it’s not real and it didn’t cause nightmares, then it’s OK. And I must thank her for that. For a while, the horror genre was one of my favorites. I saw the entire HALLOWEEN series by the time I was 10. My mom and I would have movie night where we would watch scary movies together. And because of this, horror films will always have a special place in my heart.

But, oh boy, has the horror genre really fallen. After THE RING (which I really liked) came out it spawned a new age of PG-13 horror movies that completely missed why THE RING was able to pull of its PG-13 rating. And later on, the SAW movies brought in the torture porn sub-genre which completely missed the point of the first SAW movie and just tried to make us cringe. Most horror movies now don’t know how to scare. Atmosphere and tension are completely forgotten and, most importantly, characters we care about to make us feel scared for their safety is lost. It’s all about setting up the most gruesome deaths imaginable and endless, cheap jump scares.

Which is why when I saw the trailer for DON’T BREATHE refreshing. The movie’s about three, young burglars who are breaking into an old, blind man’s house to steal his money, which they are told he’s got about $300,000, and they get trapped in his house and hunted by the blind man who happens to be a retired war-vet and crazy badass. It’s an incredibly simple premise that has a lot of opportunity for creative scares and inventive scenarios to build great tension. For the most part, I was right. DON’T BREATHE (DB from now on) definitely goes back to the old-school tension and atmosphere and has some really well set up sequences. However, it’s also a great example of how a bad third act can almost completely ruin your entire movie.

One problem I knew DB was going to have is making me root for the main characters. Three burglars aren’t exactly what you would call “good guys.” But the movie does establish pretty early that they’re not really bad people. Well, two of them aren’t. One really is. But the two that aren’t are doing this for something other than greed. Well, at least one of them is. Thinking about it now, the movie does do a good job at showing who these people are without much exposition. There is some, but it does show quite a bit rather than straight up tell us. I know who these three people are and why they’re doing it and I can at least empathise with two of them. So when they’re in danger, I do care. And these guys aren’t under the guise that they’re good, either. They know what they’re doing. They’re fully aware that they’re in the wrong. And it leaves room for them to grow. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like they really developed as characters through the course of the movie. At least they got half of this right.

With a good setup and great pacing, DB never felt boring. The first act is efficient in setting everything up and showing us the characters and scenarios before quickly getting us into the the main score. While these characters aren’t really pros at this, they know what they’re doing. A lot of detail went into how they go about pulling off these burglaries. Not so much on how they’re able to get away with it, but they at least show some competence. Even before things start getting crazy there’s a good amount of tension. The very subtle score and on-point sound cues really drive home the tension that’s greatly presented in the visual design.

Before DON’T BREATHE, the director, Fede Alvarez, showed he has talent with the horror genre by directing the EVIL DEAD reboot. I really dug that reboot and he showed off that he has great sensibilities for what horror was really missing for a while: atmosphere. Every moment in the house was unnerving even before the antagonist comes along. With such a small setting he had to get creative with how to use the space given. And he does a great job with every little bit of this house. You get a decent sense of the layout and where everyone is at any given point while also being able to make you feel hopelessly lost when it needs you to.

Stephen Lang kills it as the blind man. He is both the best and worst part about this movie. To clarify, Stephen Lang is the best part, his character later becomes the worst part. It starts off great having the old man look like a helpless old man only to quickly show how deadly he is. He’s completely within his legal right to defend his home from the invading “protagonists” and the movie could have really played up the dynamic of good people doing bad things out of necessity and how these actions affect the ones they wrong as well as how they feel as people for doing this to others. And also ask the audience who they should root for in this scenario. These could have been things that the movie did in yesteryears, but this is a modern day horror movie. And we’re supposed to have a clear cut bad guy to terrorize out good guys, so the movie goes really far out of its way to show that the blind man is definitely not a good guy. And at first, I thought with him being a military vet this could bring up PTSD and the effects of being in the craziness of war and the craziness of society with social injustices with a rich kid getting away with killing his daughter in a car accident (don’t worry, this isn’t a spoiler). But nope. The movie completely tossed that aside and made it impossible to like the blind man.

Oh boy.

I was really enjoying the first two acts of DB. The set pieces were finely crafted and had a sense of urgency to them. I wanted to root for the main characters, but at the same time, I can’t say I was completely on their side. I wanted to, but I didn’t quite feel they earned the right to win this battle. And when things started to push me to their side the movie takes a hard left turn in the third act that really made me cringe.

Now, there was a part in the second act that made me question where the movie was going. That part I talked about the PTSD possibilities… Yeah, I can’t get into it without spoiling, so I won’t. But it was an odd thing that they could have made sense out of, I guess, if they tried. But what they went for was completely absurd. In about 5 minutes I was completely turned off after almost being fully on board. This one scene utterly destroys Stephen Lang’s character. A damn shame, too. Before this one scene, he was the best part. Everything he does afterwards is just as good as everything before this. But the bad taste left behind made it nearly impossible for me to enjoy any of it.

It’s not just Lang’s character. Without giving it away, the main characters had a couple opportunities to show some growth. To learn something from all their perilous struggles and to walk away as better people because of this horrific event. But this also handled poorly. I’m not sure if it was originally scripted this way or if the writers intentionally made it so they don’t want the main characters to learn anything. And at first they tried to make the answer to this question a bit ambiguous then decides to wipe away any doubts. This could have been a redeeming moment for the movie especially after that atrocious scene before. And what remains afterwards is still clever. But there was no enjoyment to be had.

I really wanted to like DON’T BREATHE. I was excited for there to be a really good atmospheric horror movie. I was getting what I wanted for a good hour and fifteen minutes. But this just goes to show how important your final act is. That's incredibly unfortunate because there's a lot of incredible filmmaking that went into this movie. But it doesn’t matter how great your movie is if the ending is terrible. The most important part is how your audience feels when the screen goes black. That’s the feeling they’re going to take home with them. Mine was disappointment.

NOT RECOMMENDED for the most part.

But if you want to see how you can create great atmosphere and tension using a very simple premise and being really creative, then it's worth at least checking out once it gets to Netflix.

Original post HERE