Don’t Breathe (2016)

Movie Info

I choose to not make noise…not breathing isn’t really an option…

Rocky (Jane Levy) wants out of Detroit and to start a new life with her daughter.  She and her friends Alex (Dylan Minnette) and Money (Daniel Zovatto) get money by breaking into homes secured by Alex’s father’s security system, and they think they might have found their next big score that could get Rocky out once and for all.  Norman Nordstrom (Stephen Lang) is a blind man who got a huge settlement after his daughter was killed in an accident.  With plans for a quick in and out robbery, things quickly go sideways and getting out of Nordstrom’s home will be much harder than it was to break in.

Written and directed by Fede Álvarez (who had Rodo Sayagues also working on the script), Don’t Breathe is a horror thriller.  The movie was met with positive reviews and a massive box-office return for the small movie.

Obligatory night vision scene

Don’t Breathe had some really good word of mouth reviews from the start.  The movie quickly picked up steam, but it took me awhile to get to it.  It is a fun little flick that reminds me of a lot of other horror films.

The basic storyline is essentially The People Under the Stairs (minus the cannibals).  You have a treasure in a rundown house in an abandoned neighborhood and the people get caught inside the house, the walls, and basement for the course of the movie.  It doesn’t have creepy incest people running the house but it has an even creeper blind guy who has a strange (and gross) idea of how to get his daughter back.

Despite doing it for her daughter, the movie is odd in that not many of the characters are very likable.  Greed gets the best of almost all the characters at some point (except maybe Dylan Minnette’s “good guy” Alex).  Jane Levy’s Rocky is pretty flawed with her willing to risk everything for the money they’ve stolen but also willing to free the woman in the basement (which they could have called in anonymously probably).  Stephen Lang is pretty terrifying as blind man driven mad.

Didn’t see it going this direction…

The movie’s visuals are hit and miss.  I don’t love the night vision scene which you knew was coming, but I wish they could have found a different way to shoot it since this has been used multiple times but still most effectively in Silence of the Lambs.  It was low-budget, short, and cheap so I admire what they did do with the film.

Don’t Breathe was a surprisingly fun movie.  The movie’s flawed characters provide a different type of story and characters who are all at risk because they aren’t necessarily likable.  You don’t know where the movie is going to go until the end, and it is worth taking the ride for a fun horror movie.