I was really looking forward to seeing Don't Breathe. The trailer was strong, the actors involved in the project were all decent and director Fede Alverez was behind the good Evil Dead remake from a couple of years ago. On the surface (and judging from what we'd seen from the trailers) Don't Breathe should have been really quite good. Yet the movie suffers from a serious problem: it's not very scary.
Those are the words no horror or thriller wants to be branded with as it's akin to telling a baker that his bread tastes like crap. The fright factor is the most simple thing a film in this genre should manage to get right and it the most important variable in determining a projects success or failure. Sure, Don't Breathe has some nice moments of tension, but even with all the big reveals and gory moments I was never terrified of the antagonist, mostly because the film never managed to suspend my disbelief and have me belief for even an iota of a second that our main character would meet a gruesome fate. I felt like I telegraphed every turn the film was going to make and this did nothing to heighten my experience of the product. More than this, the flick does borrow certain elements and plot points from 10 Cloverfield Lane which came out earlier this year, except in this film's defence it didn't copy Cloverfield's God awful twist ending.
It didn't help that the acting was a mixed bag either. Jane Levy, who plays our lead character Rocky, is not good. Most of the time her performance is wooden and generic with it genuinely appearing to me like her agent had held a gun to her head and forced her to take the project. There are moments near the film's climax where she seems to try hard or at very least give a damn, but by this point it is too late because I honestly couldn't have cared less about her character anyway. Dylan Minnette who plays Alex (or as he will henceforth be referred, Mr Friendzone) is actually pretty decent. He plays his role a lot more believably than his fellow cast-mates, not subdued per se but far less "screamy" than Levy. To be honest, I would much rather have seen him as the focus of the film as out of all the characters we are presented with, Friendzone comes across as the mots likeable by far. Lastly, I need to mention Stephen Lang who plays our friendly neighbourhood blind psychopath. He's fine, but once again it just felt a bit generic. On a positive note, I felt he took the character in some interesting directions, with his dry and matter-of-fact tone adding a depth of dreaded realism to some of the film's more deplorable moments, but by the same token he was a tad boring. Was he ruthless? Sure. Was he an imposing threat? Yeah. But was I scared of him? Not really, and for me that might have been the film's fatal flaw.
For all its faults, the film did have some really nice touches from a technical perspective. The long shot as the trio of wanna-be burglars enter the house for the first time is really well done, giving us a room-by-room run down of our setting for the next 90 minutes. The sequence where all three of our main characters are engulfed in darkness in the basement is also extremely well-shot, and is by far and away the best five minutes of the entire movie. Yet the biggest compliment I can give to Don't Breathe is that it's audio work was outstanding. Tiny creaks of the floorboards or the sound of someone drawing breath were amplified to build towards the thrills and jump-scares the film provided. It worked well within the context of the plot, and if could separate the quality of this movie's sound and judge it on its own merit away from the final product is give it a very high grade.
Overall, Don't Breathe is a definitive disappointment, albeit a very well-crafted disappointment. The audio and camera-work are impeccable, but unfortunately the story and some of the acting really lets the movie down. It didn't really scare me and as such, in my opinion, it didn't serve its main purpose. Go see Lights Out instead. I really didn't care about this film at all.
Score: 5.9/10
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