Don't Breathe (2016)

Thieves robbing an empty house and the old man who guards it. Summed up in a line it is this simple, and the film makes that simplicity its weapon. Over a short 88-minute runtime, Don’t Breathe tightens the audience’s breath with an incident that takes place almost entirely within a single house. Instead of flashy jump scares, director Fede Álvarez sets up a single rule, that you die if you make a sound, and pushes the tension that rule creates all the way to the end. My rating is ★4.0.

What it’s about — Thieves who rob a blind old man’s house

In a decayed neighborhood of Detroit, Rocky (Jane Levy), Money (Daniel Zovatto), and Alex (Dylan Minnette) scrape by robbing empty houses. Rocky’s one goal is to take her little sister and leave this city. The three set their last big job on the house of an old man rumored to be hiding a large sum of cash. The target is a retired soldier who has lost his sight (Stephen Lang). They figured a blind old man would be easy work, but the moment they step into the house, the situation flips entirely. The old man begins hunting the intruders in the dark by hearing alone, and the thieves, unable to find a way out, become the prey of that house.

Direction — Suspense wrung from the house’s layout and sound

The most striking part of Álvarez’s direction is the way he handles space. Before the action begins, the camera already sweeps once around the house, engraving the arrangement of the rooms, the position of the stairs, the locked doors and open windows into the audience. Thanks to this, when the characters flee, we calculate along with them where they are going and what waits at the end of that path. This sense of space holds up the film’s suspense.

The sound design is also excellent. Because the old man cannot see, the characters must control their footsteps, their breathing, and the creak of the floor to the extreme, and the audience too keeps its nerves on edge at every small noise. In the basement scene, where the power is cut and it becomes total darkness, the screen switches to a near-black-and-white infrared viewpoint, and the reversal in which the one who cannot see actually gains the advantage is highly effective. That said, one premise that appears in the back half drags the story in an unnecessarily lurid direction, slightly disturbing the tidy tension built up to that point. Even so, its lean, short, and solid construction is a polish rare in this genre.

Performance — Stephen Lang, who becomes terror without dialogue

The film’s center of gravity is plainly Stephen Lang. He fills the nearly dialogue-free role of the old man with expression, breath, and the minute gestures of reacting to sound. The two-sidedness of this figure, who begins as an object of pity and at some moment turns into the most fearsome being, Lang renders persuasively and without exaggeration. Jane Levy breathes desperation and survival instinct into Rocky at once, making her not a simple victim but a dimensional character who keeps working her mind to get out to the end. The war of nerves the two wage in the dark, each gauging the other’s position, is this film’s real spectacle.

What the film says — A survival drama with no good guy to root for

What is interesting is that this film has no clear good guy. The intruders are criminals who came to rob someone’s house, and the old man who punishes them is by no means a just figure either. The film deliberately leaves empty any target the audience could comfortably root for. In the narrow space where the desire of the one trying to survive and the one trying to protect collide, the boundary of morality blurs, and the audience, unable to take anyone’s side, simply watches the next moment with bated breath. The reversal, that the being who looked like the weak one may in fact be the most dangerous, is this film’s chilling core.

Ratings & reception

The IMDb rating is 7.1 out of 10, solid support for a horror thriller made on a small budget. The Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer is 88 percent and the Metacritic score is 71 out of 100. Critics especially praised the directorial skill of sustaining tension to the end with a confined space and minimal premise. Many responded that it proved one can drive the audience purely through situational design, without a huge budget or a supernatural being.

Verdict

Don’t Breathe is a thriller with all the fat trimmed off. The concentration of carrying 88 minutes with one house, a few characters, and a single rule is a clear virtue. One excessive premise in the back half leaves something to be desired, but the sense of handling space and Stephen Lang’s presence alone make it memorable enough. As a genre film that demonstrates an aesthetic of efficiency, it is more than enough for ★4.0.

Recommended for

• Those seeking a short, intense, single-blow thriller
• Those who prefer the tension that situation creates over jump scares
• Anyone who enjoys the chill of a survival game with blurred good and evil