Don't Breathe (2016)
Directed by Fede Álvarez
A group of teens break into a blind man's home thinking they'll get away with the perfect crime. They're wrong.
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Horror films have historically used disability as an easy source of tension by way of dramatic irony (see: everything from Wait Until Dark to this year’s Hush), but Don’t Breathe reverses that paradigm.
Scripted by Rodo Sayagues and Uruguay-born director Fede Alvarez (2013 “Evil Dead” remake), its cleverly crafted misdirection and night-vision shocks are reminiscent of “Wait Until Dark” (1967) in which a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) was threatened in her small apartment.
Things go awry (as they generally do) when the blind combat veteran proves to be a more formidable opponent than our intruders anticipated, resulting in a chilling "Wait Until Dark" scenario of tiptoeing around and trying to remain silent.
It turns out a brutal, Blumhouse-produced tweak of 1967’s “Wait Until Dark” lies in store, replacing Audrey Hepburn with a blind Gulf War vet (Stephen Lang) armed with sadistic methods, who faces off against a trio of amateur criminals out to loot his home.
(Picture “Wait Until Dark” if Alan Arkin’s ruthless Harry Roat were the blind character.
“Don’t Breathe” is an original story – never mind that it borrows liberally from David Fincher’s “Panic Room” and Adam Wingard’s “ You’re Next ” – that pits three thieves against a blind man who turns out to be a ruthless killer.
When David Fincher made the confined-space “Panic Room” in 2002, he first incorporated “pre-viz” into his increasingly digital work, pre-visualizing each and every camera move before building even an inch of the set representing a 94th Street Manhattan brownstone .
Imagine if the thugs from Panic Room (2002) broke into Jodie Foster’s house and found her whacked-out uncle waiting for them in his underwear.
A bit like The People Under the Stairs meets Panic Room, the latest collaboration from Alvarez and Ghost House pummels its viewers (in a good way, of course) as much as it punishes its characters, and just when you think that things can’t possibly get any crazier, Don’t Breathe kicks things up a notch, creating a blisteringly fun thrill ride that’s a perfect showcase for Alvarez’s macabre cinematic sensibilities.
Alvarez masterfully sustains tension in thriller mode, partly by shooting slick Steadicam moves and showing restraint in cutting (Alvarez seems to have taken a lesson or two from David Fincher’s similarly themed Panic Room).
Panic Room meets Wait Until Dark in this pitiless, uncommonly serviceable horror thriller.
Jane Levy (“Evil Dead”), Dylan Minette (“Scandal”) and Daniel Zovatto (“It Follows”) are dead-enders looking for a way out of Detroit’s urban wasteland.
The new film, directed by Fede Alvarez (2013’s “Evil Dead”), is a visceral home-invasion thriller with a nice spin: The supposed victim is more of a menace than the burglars.
Working from a concise screenplay by fellow Uruguayan Rodo Sayagues, Alvarez -- making his second movie on the heels of his disappointing "Evil Dead" remake -- cannily treats the vet as a puppy dog gone rabid.
Written by director Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, who previously collaborated on Alvarez’s directorial debut, the ultra-gory 2013 remake of The Evil Dead (which also starred Levy), Don’t Breathe works in clockwork fashion, winding tighter and tighter as it goes along.
“Don’t Breathe,” co-written and directed by “Evil Dead” helmer Fede Alvarez, begins by showing how this misbegotten trio works.
The world should’ve known writer/director Fede Alvarez would give us something like "Don’t Breathe" when he successfully remade "Evil Dead" three years ago.
But writer/director Fede Alvarez (2013's "Evil Dead") has more horror references stashed away in his locked house horror, his premise not too far afield from this year's earlier "Green Room."
As the thieves scramble around like frightened mice, there’s little logic to their escape plans, and the geography is too hazily mapped out for Alvarez to build sustained tension through proximity (as Jeremy Saulnier managed beautifully with “Green Room” and Dan Trachtenberg did with aplomb in “10 Cloverfield Lane”).
Add Fede Alvarez’s “Don’t Breathe” to the canon of instant-classic horror movies of 2016, joining “Green Room,” “Lights Out” and “The Conjuring 2.” Like “Lights Out,” “Don’t Breathe” revolves around an ingenious concept – a team of Detroit teen burglars rob the house of a blind man who isn’t so helpless – and like “Green Room,” it taps into devastatingly contemporary cultural undercurrents.
The Uruguan-born filmmaker shows no signs of changing his ways with his followup feature, Don’t Breathe, which is destined to battle it out with the likes of Green Room and 10 Cloverfield Lane for the title of Top Hollywood Fright Flick of 2016.
But the film has just as much in common with Jeremy Saulnier's recent room-escape movie Green Room and Dan Trachtenberg's similarly claustrophobic 10 Cloverfield Lane , and it joins them as one of 2016's tensest horror films.
Even the horror hardcore may discover that Don't Breathe pushes their buttons in ways they didn't expect - only Green Room has served up the same kind of claustrophobia and chills this year.
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Among its other cringe-inducing but impressive feats, “Don’t Breathe” contains one of the 10 most disgusting scenes I’ve ever seen in a horror film, and I’m going all the way back to Linda Blair’s antics in “The Exorcist” as a reference point.
Alvarez’s directorial sensibility is on much greater display here than it was in “Evil Dead,” executing a series of impressive shots starting with a Fincher-esque bit that goes places a cameraman cannot normally go (think “Panic Room”) and building up to a breathless sequence shot in near-total darkness that will recall a certain scene from “The Silence of the Lambs.”
You get the inevitable lights-out scene with the robbers trying to evade The Blind Man and Alvarez switching to night vision, just as Jonathan Demme did in The Silence of the Lambs with much more success.
In one especially effective, odds-evening sequence (after The Silence of the Lambs), Alvarez devises his own style of night vision (which turns the wide-eyed ingénues’ pupils and irises unnervingly big and black).
Though blindness has been an effective component of horror films past, it’s usually a tool to heighten vulnerability, like Audrey Hepburn fending off intruders in Wait Until Dark or Jodie Foster being stalked by a serial killer with night vision glasses in The Silence of the Lambs.
El artilugio de Demme en The Silence of the Lambs se reinterpreta así de manera magistral, en grises y negros, sin la necesidad de una justificación de punto de vista: aquí, el perseguidor es ciego.
The premise is incredibly similar to Wes Craven’s underrated thriller The People Under The Stairs, which turns 25 this year, and which used the same basic plot to make harsh accusations about class warfare and social hypocrisy.
Wes Craven’s The People Under The Stairs and the French Livide have played this reverse-the-threat game – though another contemporary run of movies have regular criminals clashing with outright maniacs (No One Lives, The Neighbour, The Collector).
A bit like The People Under the Stairs meets Panic Room, the latest collaboration from Alvarez and Ghost House pummels its viewers (in a good way, of course) as much as it punishes its characters, and just when you think that things can’t possibly get any crazier, Don’t Breathe kicks things up a notch, creating a blisteringly fun thrill ride that’s a perfect showcase for Alvarez’s macabre cinematic sensibilities.
Fans of horror flicks like Livid, The Collector, and the off-kilter cult classic The People Under the Stairs know what I mean.
What he achieves is significant: A home invasion story that is as artfully terrifying as Home Alone was entertainingly hilarious.
In that sense, it's kind of like a twisted "Home Alone" for millennials.
It is a home-invasion thriller and, if we’re allowing those in, then surely Home Alone registers as horror.
Furthermore, The Blind Man is a sight-impared-war-veteran version of Home Alone ’s Kevin McCallister, Audrey Hepburn was a more reasonable blind person in Wait Until Dark, and Marshall Mather’s mom in 8 Mile and Rocky’s mom are the same person (which I can only deduce to mean that Rocky is Eminem’s sister).
With its “Home Alone”-style house of horrors, “Don’t Breathe” almost never goes where you’d expect.
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Y es que, en su tramo final, No respires se transforma en un gozoso slasher cargado de sorpresas, ingeniosísimos giros de guion y algún detalle poético muy de agradecer –esa simbólica mariquita–, pero sin renunciar a guiñar el ojo a cintas de los 80 como Cujo (Lewis Teague, 1983) –es notorio el protagonismo del feroz perro que custodia la seguridad del invidente– o Noche de miedo (Tom Holland, 1985) –esa identidad oculta bajo la apariencia de vecino normal y un inmueble que alberga terribles secretos, aunque estos sean más terrenales que fantásticos en este caso–.
Even Stephen King’s Cujo is brought to mind more than once.
The cast also features the craziest dog in film since 1983’s Cujo!
There's an analogue in tales of Amazons cutting off their breast to better facilitate the drawing of a bow--your reminder that this is the original ending to the book that would become Jane Campion's brutal/beautiful In the Cut .