HOUSE OF horror
DIRECTOR FEDE ALVAREZ PLACES EXTRAORDINARY FOCUS ON FUNCTIONS OF TIME AND SPACE — AND NOT MUCH ELSE
Fede Alvarez, director of Don’ t Breathe, has the eye for form of an architect, the taste in detail of an interior designer and the way with presentation of a real estate agent — all of which are rare qualities in a filmmaker, especially one keen to set a movie almost entirely within a single dilapidated two- storey Victorian house. This house, a shabby relic of bygone prosperity in downtown Detroit, the last holdout in a neighbourhood abandoned, is treated by Alvarez like it’s the Palace of Versailles.
Give every member of the audience a piece of paper and a pencil, and ask them to map this house out once the credits roll. You’ll get an inch-perfect blueprint, every time.
Our time in this house is occasioned by a familiar scenario: a trio of petty thieves — Rocky ( Jane Levy), Alex ( Dylan Minnette), and Money ( Daniel Zovatto), each more the archetypal horror victim than the last — has descended upon it, the home of a blind veteran ( Stephen Lang), to snatch up the few hundred thousand dollars cash they’ve learned may be squirrelled away inside. But the thieves are the heroes, and their mark is a maniac, which makes Don’t Breathe a sort of home-invasion thriller in reverse.
You can probably guess how this goes. The doors are locked, the windows are barred, the diabolical blind man has a gun. Our heroic thieves are obliged to slink and creep around him. It’s what in the parlance of movie marketing would be called “a deadly game of hide and seek.”
This is the kind of premise, easily conveyed to the impatient with a 20-second TV spot or billboard ad copy, that’s intriguing precisely because it’s predictable, because everyone knows what sort of things to expect.
And indeed they’re nearly all accounted for. There’s the errant cellphone buzzing and beeping at just the wrong moment. There’s the damnable floorboard that inopportunely squeaks. There are all manner of close calls, hold- your- breath moments, with the blind man nosing out one of our bandits or groping wildly about a centimetre and a half from a poor Teen’s monk-silent face. The only thing missing is the old ‘ill-timed sneeze’ routine.
Our heroes are compelled to spend so much time skulking around the house quietly that whenever one of them do make a noise, often stupidly, the entire audience groans in unison, as if they’re blurting out, “Hey, blind man, I’m over here!”
The cast is small, the house is narrow and the villain, despite his best glowering, can’t do much to thwart his prey except wait for them to blunder, which they can only do so often in so many ways. Alvarez’s instinct is for amplification. Situational villainy turns into unambiguous supervillainy, courtesy of the basement dungeon and rather severe case of kidnapping our heroes happen upon toward the end of the second act. Hide and seek turns into fisticuffs and, at one point, a tussle that practically resembles pro wrestling, replete with a bloody beating by ball-peen hammer.
Alvarez’s last film, Evil Dead, afforded him ample opportunity for homicidal extravagance, what with its portals to hell and all the demonic carnage they produced. But confined to one house and one baddie, with so precious few potential corpses? You can sense he’s at a loss, and he strains hard to devise an excuse to wallow in vileness.
Of considerably more interest than his efforts to be vulgar is the director’s affinity for spaces. He brings so much talent to bear on a task most filmmakers hardly think about: establishing where we are and how things exist in relation to one another. Alvarez shoots our heroic trio’s housebreaking in a single unbroken long take, tracking the teens as they move from room to room, exploring the hallways, probing the walk-in closet, ducking into the bathroom, peering this way and that. He lingers over details — a hammer on a hook, a skylight, the lock on a basement door — so that when they reappear, seized in a fight or suddenly relied upon, they don’t seem like script-friendly contrivances.
“Early on I got together with all the department heads around a table in my house and we laid out the chessboard of the movie,” Alvarez told Filmmaker Magazine. “We created a big board with a hallway, living room, etc., and used some of my action figures to plot out where in the house everyone was in every scene… By the time we played out the whole movie on that blueprint, we knew where all the doors should be, where all the windows should be, where the characters should be in relation to each other at any given moment.”
Such rigour! That really is commendable, and it’s a talent I wish other directors had, or even cared about. The only thing for Alvarez to do now is make a film in which every other facet — things like character development, story mechanics, theme — is developed as thoughtfully as the house. I feel I know it better after 88 minutes than I do places I’ve been going to in real life for years. ΩΩ