Payton Williams
Staff Writer
The world of horror filmmaking seems very cynical at times. For every great, sincere work of art desperately locking an audience in nerve jangling suspense, there is a sea of unoriginal mediocrity taking advantage of audeince expectations of what a horror movie should be. Horror has become formulaic. There at times seems to be no creative flair left in the genre.
But then, increasingly seldom though the event may be, something like Fede Alvarez’s “Don’t Breathe” comes along.
From the very opening shot, a devastatingly slow zoom on a ruined suburban Detroit street that resolves with some deeply creepy foreshadowing, “Don’t Breathe” sets itself apart. This film is not another “Insidious” clone. This movie is a little more ferocious and a little more daring.
The setup is very simple: Rocky (Jane Levy) is a young woman trying to escape her horrible home life and help her young sister escape the same upbringing she had. She is part of a trio who routinely break into people’s houses to turn over fairly meager profits. Together the extremely ignorant and abrasive Money (Daniel Zovatto) and the almost too well meaning Alex (Dylan Minnette) plan their biggest score yet: robbing a blind Gulf War veteran living in a mostly abandoned part of the city, and rumored to have received a huge settlement after the death of his daughter. It seems too good to be true, and as the trio slowly begin to discover the old veteran’s terrible secrets, they quickly discover it is too good to be true.
In order to make something clear, this is not a complex or “new” film, so to speak. It has all the movements you would expect in a film like this, executed very well and occasionally very differently, but it is a typical horror thriller by and large. However, it is in the small, loving details, and the attention to craft that make this film so interesting and, in the current horror filmmaking climate, even subversive. It has real energy, it crackles with life and tension in every shot, and the editing revitalizes a suspense unseen for a long time.
In the end, this film is probably not a contender for greatest horror movie ever. At a different time, this film would have felt terribly typical. The film does flinch in some important places, and someone who watches a lot of horror thrillers will not be terribly surprised or shocked by anything here. But the fact remains that, as the horror climate is now, this movie feels very refreshing. It is a theatrical horror experience you simply do not find much anymore, and it is definitely worth seeing.