★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Only a few minutes
into Don’t Breathe, as our young
protagonists clamber under a workbench (a much revisited location in the labyrinthine
house into which they’ve broken), the camera chooses not to follow them,
lingering instead on a large hammer. The pause in movement lasts barely two
seconds, but it’s enough to fill our minds with all kinds of stomach-churning
possibilities for how the tool might be used later in the film. It’s that
ability to incite discomfort with the simplest of images that allows this
superior home invasion thriller to rise above its contemporary, cattle-prod
fright-heavy affairs of recent years.
Jane Levy stars as
Rocky, the unloved daughter of a neglectful mother, who hopes to escape the dismal
streets of Detroit and build a better life for herself. She accompanies her two
male friends Alex (Dylan Minnette) and Money (Daniel Zovatto) in a series of
break-ins to secure funds for their future. Her speciality: disabling the
alarms of affluent homes. The trio find what they believe to be their final job
in the form of a run-down neighbourhood housing a single occupant; a blind army
veteran (the film gives him no other name) played by Stephen Lang, who lives
off the money he won in a court case against the woman who killed his daughter.
Soon after sneaking their way into his suspiciously lock-heavy abode, they
discover that their victim is far from helpless, as so begins a deadly game of
hide-and-seek as the three youngsters desperately search for a way to elude the
blind man, his gun, and his terrifying dog.
This comes to us
from hotshot Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez of 2013’s Evil Dead remake; an unbelievably gory affair chock full of the
splatter that all those scary movies my generation were forbidden from watching
as children failed to deliver. Alvarez’ remake of Sam Raimi’s classic also
holds a special place in my heart as the only film I ever saw underage
(granted, it was by less than two months, but for me that was as close to
rebellious as I ever got). Having seen only flashes of the rave reviews to come
out of the States and expecting a similarly bloody affair, what I got subverted
my expectations in the best possible way: not only did it scare me, it scared
me in a far different way to Evil Dead,
and also instilled more fear than any horror since Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs.
Don’t Breathe ditches the boring efficiency of a Blumhouse
or James Wan picture (protagonist hears funny noise, the sound dips enough to
make you think the speakers might be broken, before a scary monster leaps out
and the audience jumps, ad infinitum) and opts instead for a more natural and elegant rhythm.
There’s a moment where the blind geriatric, searching for the source of a
creaky floorboard, roves his gun from one side of the room to the other,
hovering for an instant in front of both Rocky and Alex’ faces. This unbearably
slow rotation repeats, but the old man only grips the gun more tightly as he slinks
away into the next room, leaving the scene on an equally terrifying, uncertain
note. The tension is not ruptured, only risen.
A standard home
intrusion premise eases you into familiar territory (old people are scary and
young people are idiots), before suddenly, violently changing the stakes, which
Alvarez continues into the second and third acts, faltering only in the latter
when the roundabout nature of the plot feels like a re-tread. Our central trio
are not quite the usual clueless adolescents, either: true, dreadlocked
numskull Money comes closest, but Alex and Rocky are far more resourceful and
believable. I may come to regret the phrasing of this, but Jane Levy has a
great face for horror. Amongst her bland and interchangeable contemporaries (seriously,
protagonists in the genre have taken an utter nosedive of late), Levy will shriek,
cry, chew on her knuckles and sprint from danger like no other, and you totally
buy the white-hot terror seared across every pore of her face.
Lang, too, is on
excellent form as the tenant from hell, a man of short sentences and shorter temperament.
Speaking in a guttural wheeze befitting of an aged Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, the reasoning he
places behind his eventual goal is revealed to be just as horrific as he is.
Granted, fear, much
like comedy, is entirely subjective (what scares you won’t necessarily scare somebody
else), but I’d be surprised to hear the story of anyone who emerges afterwards
with barely a shiver in their bones. I was the sole occupant of the cinema, and
found myself slowly curling into a ball as the other seats creaked in the gale
of the air conditioning. The whole room seemed to stretch on, into the screen,
where cinematographer Pedro Luque amps up the dolly zoom to emphasize the
desolate, uncaring streets that is the trio’s only escape.
As I alluded to earlier,
this isn’t as grisly as Evil Dead (though
there is plenty of violence), but it’s
easily twice as frightening, and I’m truly ecstatic to see the promise shown in
Alvarez’ first feature present here in abundance. Don’t Breathe is not flawless, but it's rightfully winning over everyone
who spent the past decade fawning over the trite work of Wan to the idea that the
true saviour of modern horror needed only to wipe away the giblets to be seen.
