DON’T BREATHE ■ The blind man is king
If you have any interest in watching DON’T BREATHE, don’t watch the trailer. It’s as spoilerific as the unnecessary opening scene of the movie, which reveals way too much about the end of the story. DON’T BREATHE follows the plight of Rocky (Jane Levy), Alex (Dylan Minnette) and Money (Daniel Zovatto), a trio of thieves who live in a poor area of destitute Detroit and make an ill-gotten living by breaking into houses. After a particularly low-scoring heist, the gang guns for a high-profile job that promises to net them, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of dollars: enough to allow them to move away from Detroit and to a potentially happier life.
When they eventually make it to the target house, whose sole occupant is a blind war veteran (Stephen Lang) and his Rottweiler, they soon realise they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. It’s a tricky balancing act to make you feel sorry for opportunistic thieves, especially because only Rocky has the benefit of a single scene that shows her desperation to make money. If you don’t buy into her motivation, though, it’s hard to feel sorry for her when bad things start happening. Alex is the most sympathetic of the trio, even if he pulls a full 180 turn on his motivation later in the story, but there’s little in the way for caring about Money’s plight.
Lang plays the unnamed blind man in an engaging way, with a mixture of timely vulnerability spliced with believable lethality. The only thing that’s off about him is his Bane-like (Tom Hardy) voice, which feels out of place. There are bigger gripes, though, particularly in how the movie awkwardly jumps between thriller and horror tropes, assumedly in an effort to keep its admittedly thin ‘blind guy versus thieves’ premise fresh. Some of the better moments are straight-up borrowed from iconic movies, but despite this, DON’T BREATHE still manages to be genuinely tense and even occasionally unnerving in a short running time that wastes very little time in putting the leading trio in harm’s way. It’s not the horror classic it could have been, but there’s enough good stuff going on here to warrant the price of admission.
