THE FRIGHT STUFF
Don’t Breathe will give you the creeps
Fede Alvarez, director of Don’t Breathe, has an eye for form like an architect, a taste for detail like an interior designer and a way with presentation like 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 members of the audience paper and a pencil, and ask them to map this house out once the credits roll. You’ll get an inchperfect 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, holdyour-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.
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 scriptfriendly contrivances.
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.