By Keri O’Shea
If ever you felt cordially invited to loathe a set of characters within the first few minutes of a film, then Don’t Breathe seems to offer it; we’re shown, from the outset, a group of three young housebreakers who use their ill-begotten insider info to get in to well-to-do homes, take as many expensive personal items as they can carry and then flee, though not without deliberately breaking a few things and pissing on the floor. This, combined with the fact that the film elects to use for its very first scene some stark evidence that all is not going to go well for these people, would seem to suggest that Don’t Breathe is rather too ready to offer these thieves up as human sacrifices, and that the film will be the same sort of exercise in futile cruelty as the chronically-pointless Evil Dead remake.
I’m happy to report that this isn’t the case: Fede Alvarez’s more recent venture is a far superior film to Evil Dead, and although he almost can’t help himself but to initially signpost plot devices in a way which suggests he fears the audience are idiots, he soon surpasses this (or at least forgets about it,) providing a tightly-wound home invasion movie which has very few flaws.
Our gang of miscreants – the straightforwardly-loathsome wannabe gangster Money (Daniel Zovatto), his girlfriend and single mother Rocky (Jane Levy) and the guy whose dad conveniently runs a home security firm and thus enables the whole thing, Alex (Dylan Minnette) – have been doing their research, and they’ve happened upon a job that they believe could be the last they ever need to do. Turns out, in a barely-populated area of their city of Detroit, there’s a house possibly filled to the brim with compensation awarded to an elderly veteran after the death of his only daughter in a road accident. Although they’re not certain the money is in there, they convince Alex to bring the keys anyway; discovering that the man (Stephen Lang) is blind gives them some slight pause, but hey, filthy lucre drives them onwards – and we know from one of those klaxon plot development moments that Rocky in particular isn’t simply cruel, she’s desperate, and needs the money to start a new life with her little girl.
All of this rattles along at a good pace, and again, although Alvarez didn’t need to more or less shout at us ‘Hey guys! Look! Household tools!’ or ‘Looky! I’m zooming in on the weapon here, so you know where it is later, okay?’ the interior of the house, where the greatest part of the film takes place, is used to good effect. It’s reminiscent of the ‘old dark house’ idea – a space which conceals more than it reveals, with a wealth of liminal space as well as many dangers for those not in the know. But perhaps what Don’t Breathe excels at is its representation of ‘the man’ who inhabits this space.
The intruders are at first very assured, and to counterbalance this, the man is portrayed as very vulnerable, a father in mourning, and someone with a quality-of-life-limiting disability. We first see him in bed, after all, listening to old videos of his daughter as a child – and if there are any difficulties in finding empathy for the three amigos, then the first scenes with Lang make it seem much more clear to find it for him. In a few deft moves however, the man is no longer simply frail, which is testament to Lang’s excellent performance here; as the housebreakers begin to make their inevitable mistakes, he switches to being a much more ambiguous figure before, ultimately, going beyond this understandable resourcefulness as someone still capable of defending his home, turning increasingly violent and fixated. At his furthest reaches as a character, the man becomes almost supernatural, his damaged eyes made to appear monstrous on-screen, and his abilities to feel his way around in the dark setting him above the young intruders in terms of physical threat. All of this keeps the film fresh and interesting; as the cat-and-mouse turns more grisly, inter-character relationships are entertainingly fluid.
I suspect perhaps that Alvarez was somewhat drunk on the capacity for the film to allow for such dramatic shifts, or else as a modern horror director he felt honour-bound to weave just one more commonplace sub-genre into the narrative, but quite honestly – there’s one plot lurch here which is just not needed, and which catapults ‘the man’ out of the realms of ambiguity and into far more sinister terrain. Of course I’m not going to name and shame it, but it seems to me that this entire sequence needed to hit the cutting room floor, not least because it showcases some notions about human fertility and family planning which are almost charming in their naivety. (Thought speaking of naive – I thought that during this particular scene, the man was making a cup of tea with milk he couldn’t tell was off because, duh, he’s blind! When you see the film, and you’ll know the bit I mean, think of that, and also the fact that I’d be happy to believe a dangerous individual would pause to make a brew halfway through proceedings. The truth of this scene is only scarcely less unlikely, mind.)
Alvarez is, really speaking, a new kid on the block in the horror scene; this is only his second feature after all. Sure, I wasn’t a fan of his first one, but if Evil Dead has done anything beyond itself, then it seems at least to have allowed him to let loose with a story of his own here, albeit one which draws influence from existing films. But drawing influence from existing films is fine, it’s a world away from a re-do, and you can see here that he’s developing his own, rapid-fire, well-realised style. It’s all very encouraging, and Don’t Breathe is a huge step up. If Alvarez can just learn to trust us a little more, as well as remembering that you needn’t crowd your story with material which is too jarring, then I think we could see better and better, equally-entertaining films ahead. I certainly hope that’s the case.
Don’t Breathe is on general release now.
A lot of the films we cover on the site relate to the great ‘what if?’, the playing out of fantastical scenarios, some more realistic, many supernatural and many fairly impossible if not utterly so – but a genre we rarely get asked to cover is the disaster movie. It’s strange that so very few good disaster movies cross our paths, really, because if we’re fascinated with ‘what ifs’, then surely there’s plenty of horror and drama to derive from the ‘not ifs, whens’. This is the precise set-up for The Wave (aka Bølgen), a Norwegian-language disaster film which starts with some real-life footage of a twentieth-century rockslide which obliterated a Norwegian village called Geiranger. We’re told that this kind of rockslide will inevitably happen again in future, and that a site called the Åkernes Crevice is at especial risk of further widening, which when – not if – it does, will send a massive amount of debris into the fjord beneath, creating a tsunami likely to wipe out all of the picturesque homes on the fjord’s shores. It’s something you can’t help but bear in mind as you watch the film unfold, and whilst The Wave carries with it some tried-and-tested disaster movie plot devices, it’s already one step up in terms of engagement. 
The Bloodstained Butterfly starts off with some understanding of this: a beautiful French student is found, dead, in the woods – wearing the bloodstained butterfly of the title around her neck, we assume (and the follow-up scene is of course of some amorous lovers, thus splicing death with sex, as is traditional.) Clearly there’s a maniac at large, or we wouldn’t be watching this story – but the heavy rain at the time of the killing has watched away the forensic evidence, and the killer managed to evade the dragnet which attempts to close in as soon as the alarm is raised. All that’s known about him, at this point, is that he’s clad in a beige raincoat. The hunt is on. Or, rather, we then see a slow succession of lab processes and meticulous ‘going over the evidence’ in order to close in on the possible culprit. When a witness comes forward to say she knows who the killer is, the case takes a turn: it seems, then, that the girl’s lover, a TV presenter, was the man responsible. Others corroborate, and soon the erstwhile TV star, Allesandro Marchi, is hauled into court on seemingly damning evidence of his involvement. Things are, however, rarely this straightforward. As the case is debated – at length – other factors are revealed, and it seems that Marchi might not be the maniac after all. A philanderer, yes, but perhaps not the murderer…
The Arrow release is, as I have suggested, the definitive deal, containing all of the films in their entirety: the prints look good, though the third film retains a rather grainy veneer, and the audio is solid throughout. This all brings me, however, to a rare smattering of criticisms. Firstly – the main cover art for this is rather lacklustre. No personal disrespect intended towards the artist, but this isn’t the usual calibre for an Arrow release, neither clearly in keeping with the manga style to my eye (which I dislike actually, but would tie in with the films’ origins) nor showing the draftsmanship I’ve come to expect. It surely takes some doing to make Meiko Kaji look ugly. Sorry. However, I haven’t seen the fold-outs or other materials, so these may be another story altogether.
And here’s the first thing I’d forgotten: the film-within-a-film framework which kicks things off, where a TV show called One Dollar Movie introduces the film alongside a very silly lottery for its viewers. Cue a FULL 80S beach scene, with lots of aimless bikini dancing to a ghetto blaster – wait, that’s the wrong film, so that’s exchanged, and then we’re into the intended film, which starts in a FULL 80S laboratory scene. You know an 80s laboratory – 
The plot hardly needs describing, given the above, but I’ll give it a whirl: we start with a room full of dead bodies, though with a couple of people left alive who are communicating with a mysterious someone via mobile phone (sound familiar?). They’ve decided to disguise their voice so thoroughly you can barely make out what they’re saying, which could have put a crimp in the plot, but basically it’s something about the people who are left having to follow commands to kill one another, which perhaps clues you in to why there are so many corpses in this particular dimly-lit room. You know where we’re going from here – yes, back in time, where we see some folks in HAZMAT gear dragging the inmates into the room, where they duly wake up and start wondering why they’re there. Whoever has put them there wants them to work out why they’ve been chosen, as well as spicing things up by getting them to bump one another off from time to time.
At first Ginny seems sweet, if the rather unlikely ‘little old lady’ that she’s apparently meant to present: t’isn’t long, though, before we can hear her inner thoughts (a staple of this film) and they are none too complimentary to the young ladies sat in her lounge now laughing at her ‘favourite show’, one of the film’s most baffling inclusions and something which features throughout – a shopping channel show where scream queen Suzi Lorraine, wearing a fat suit, rails against the indignities heaped upon ‘real women’ and tries to sell plus size clothes via a glamorous model, or rather an obese man in drag – an obese man who continually eats, as does Suzi, obviously. Hmm. Anyway, come some internal monologue about the shallowness of youth and beauty, it’s then time for the girls to be drugged, kidnapped and very soon afterwards hacked up for chow. As all of this happens in the first few minutes, I think I’m safe on the spoilers front: the film very much shows its trump hand early, albeit it then making us wait for anything much else in terms of plot.
It’s very early indeed in the film that we’re able to work out that Khalfoun has a talent for representing rather unlikable young men on our screens: oh, I know that’s based on an unrepresentative sample, but if you can make Elijah Wood into a terrifying creep, then you’ve clearly got form. With that in mind, we meet Josh (comedian Jeremiah Watkins), a young man whose personality is an unpalatable blend of dude-bro, frustrated geek and infantile Gen-Xer: when him and his friends aren’t wondering aloud how they can bang hot bitches, Josh hosts an online video channel, where his focus is reviewing phone apps. He lives for his follower count: this rather gets in the way of him paying his rent, pleasing his parents (who paid a lot of money to see him through college) or holding down a relationship, but for Josh, that’s always a set of issues for the next day. Well, one day he reviews an app called ‘i-Lived’. It’s meant to be a motivational application which helps you towards your life goals – Josh chooses ‘getting a six pack’ so he can attract women – but it falls flat, so he pans it online and thinks no more about it. That is, until the app kicks back into life while he’s at a party and, in a roundabout way, gets him a girl he thinks is out of his league.
For all this – a tour through torment which could have come off feeling brusque and insincere – I felt a lot of immediate sympathy for Anna. Whether the subtle style of acting which Riesgraf brings to these events, or else the unflinching portrayal of disease and death we’re shown (platitudes about Conrad ‘going to a better place’ are either not forthcoming at all or are rendered implausible) the film makes itself instantly engaging. You also can’t help but feel from the get-go that this environment, the white-picket fence homestead which is nonetheless cluttered and littered with the detritus of defiantly not coping for ten years, is a powder keg, and one which may explode in ways other than the instantly obvious (because the film’s promo materials are pretty obvious about the fact that someone’s coming in…)
After telling us this on-screen, kudos to the film for then getting a lesbian kiss into proceedings before much more than ten seconds of modern-day footage pass by. After snogging Sissy (Anna Walton), an old pal gets all embarrassed and beats a hasty retreat from the bar where they’d met – running smack bang into a horde of hood-wearing occultists, who spirit her away for some ritualistic goings-on near what we can assume is the self-same tree mentioned earlier. Unless there’s an orchard in Orchard, but that would probably be silly. Actually, we then segue to a classroom presentation about the legend of the tree, allowing us to combine these two different worlds in one fell swoop. Sissy has just become the hockey coach at this school; one member of the school hockey team is a troubled teen called Faith (Naomi Battrick – who in true cinematic tradition is more like twenty-five) and it soon becomes clear that this is our key character. Faith’s father is very ill, and when his prognosis worsens, she finds it very difficult to bear. Luckily, the soporific hockey mistress is there to be a shoulder to cry on, after a fashion at least. Faith is offered a deal, one which draws her in to a world of malign magic and – bingo! – pregnancy. Why aren’t women ever given anything else to do in demonology than have babies or trick other women into having them? #EverydaySexism