Don't Breathe movie review: Thrill, shock sans blood

Cast: Stephen Lang, Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Daniel Zovatto, Jane Graves
Director: Fede Alvarez

Don’t Breathe is succinct, crafty and specially designed to take you on a trip that overwhelms you with strange emotional responses to the story. You are made to love and hate the characters, there are no heroes and there is no conclusion to the story. There is also an intense feeling of being stuck in a situation or a loop, one in which you had no intention to be. The film does away with the pretence just after the opening credits. It gives you a taste of what is coming to you, and with that honesty, it grabs your attention. The story is of a simple house robbery gone wrong, but one has no idea how wrong it can go. The other thing is the absolute lack of drama, the sequence of events occurs as if it is a document.

It takes its little time to get you in the house, in the abandoned locality, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Rows of carefully planned houses, empty roads, empty neighborhoods with no one who could come to rescue or salvage. One wonders why is it that a blind, retired, widower would be living in such a place. You have sympathy for the Blind Man (Stephen Lang) and a bit of disgust for the trio who is breaking into his house to steal his money, but as we go further into the story, the sympathy transforms into fear and finally into disgust.

As for the trio you simply find it a little ironic. The transforming moment is the discovery in the basement, where a girl is being held captive for years. Norman Nordstrom aka the Blind Man is a very interesting character with his interesting physicality along with Stephen Lang’s portrayal of a blind man who is murderous, faithless and revengeful. The characters have cliché introductions, without much backstory, one gets a very brief insight into the life of Rocky (Jane Levy) only to serve as a desperate situation, which becomes motivation for them to execute the break-in.

In the chain of events that follow, after a point, it becomes inconsequential if they finally have an escape, and you are watching it further not to know if they would escape, but simply to see what further trickery is involved in it. The performances are good, and with such a story the burden on the actors is reduced. Fede Alvarez’s patience and meticulous planning makes this a truly nail-biting movie; there is a lot of refinement in his use of sound and lighting. There is a brilliant sequence shot in darkness, giving you a dry and de-saturated image that is very close to reality. The cinematography is perfect except a few places where it becomes amateurish and shabby.

In those moments when the filmmaker tries to give us a little more, more than what is there already, but it actually gives us less, so much that it dissolves the impact created so far. While the film has little dialogue, the action and thrill continue. It is good to watch Fede playing so well with the cinematic form, without using much gimmick or special effects that seem obvious in most films. He was also successful in preventing the film from crossing over to the supernatural side while there was every possibility for him to make it one, to make it more obvious there is also a line in the movie denying God. He also achieved another feat by creating thrill and shock without showing much blood.

The writer is founder, Lightcube Film Society