‘DON’T BREATHE’ R 1:28
2016 has been a banner year for excellent horror films, which seems at times appropriate, given the horrors of this calendar year — shootings, war, natural disaster, an unprecedented presidential campaign. When it feels like the world is going to hell in a handbasket, there’s catharsis to be found in a horror film where the final girl fights off the boogey man.
Add Fede Alvarez’s “Don’t Breathe” to the canon of instant-classic horror movies of 2016, joining “Green Room,” “Lights Out” and “The Conjuring 2.” Like “Lights Out,” “Don’t Breathe” revolves around an ingenious concept — a team of teen burglars rob the house of a blind man who isn’t so helpless — and like “Green Room,” it taps into devastatingly contemporary cultural undercurrents. The teen burglars live in the wasteland of a downtrodden Detroit; home invasion burglary seems like the only way out for these lower-middle class white kids.
The three are driven by their lack of options, and as have-nots, feel somewhat justified in stealing from the haves. But there are larger motivations at stake. Rocky (Jane Levy) is desperate for an escape from her abusive mother’s house, for herself and her sister. She’s backed up by her thugged-out wild-card boyfriend Money (Daniel Zovatto) and her friend Alex (Dylan Minnette), the brains of the operation, who harbors a crush on the unavailable Rocky.
It’s not long before they’re tipped off to a Gulf War vet (Steven Lang), sitting on a large cash settlement from his daughter’s wrongful death, hit by a teen driver. It’s only after they’ve set their sights on him that they discover the man is blind, but still proceed with the burglary. They’ve grossly underestimated their target, both in his physical capabilities and in his desire for retribution.
Alvarez and writer Rodo Sayagues have devised some incredibly suspenseful set pieces around the man’s blindness, which the teens attempt to exploit in order to escape the house and make off with the dough. But he’s battened down the hatches on his dark, crumbling home, knows every floorboard creak and is unwilling to part with his goods — or let any deed go unpunished. Alvarez masterfully uses silence and sound throughout, re-creating the sensory experience of the man.
The audience is privy to all the close brushes in tight hallways and stifled screams as the invaders attempt to hide in plain sight. We see the dilated pupils of our protagonists, bumbling sightless in a pitch black basement, the playing field leveled to their captor. The tension never lets up, and the shocking twists in the story need to be seen to be believed.
There aren’t any “good guys” in “Don’t Breathe,” as victimizers become victims and back again. We align ourselves with Rocky and Alex, fighting for their lives, but there’s some empathy for the blind man, a disabled vet protecting his home and the dark secrets it contains.
While the sight-based conceit offers the opportunity for clever suspense and scares, it’s the starkly realistic setting and newsworthy themes underpinning the spooky tale that make the horror of this film so bone-chilling. “Don’t Breathe” is terrifying because it doesn’t rely on the supernatural or fantasy. These horrors are all too real and all too plausible, stories that we see on the news regularly — grown right here in the USA.
Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Stephen Lang and Daniel Zovatto. (Terror, violence, disturbing content and language including sexual references)
Arthur Bishop returns as the Mechanic in the sequel to the 2011 global hit. When someone from his past forces him back into the business, Bishop has to complete an impossible list of assassinations of the most dangerous men in the world.
Jason Statham, Jessica Alba, Tommy Lee Jones, Michelle Yeoh and Sam Hazeldine. (Violence throughout and language)
‘SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU’
PG-13 1:24
Writer-director Richard Tanne’s feature film debut “Southside With You” views history through an unlikely, heart-shaped prism: the first date between Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson, his future wife.
Contemplating further such forays into presidential romance is indeed frightful.
Are we itching closer to a rom-com about the courtship between Gerald and Betty? Or, heaven help us, “Pizza Night With Bill and Hillary?” And yet Tanne’s film is no mere First Couple valentine. Nuanced and charming, “Southside With You” is a sunny, strolling odyssey through African-American life in 1989, filtered through two future icons as they navigate the world around them and their place in it.
Tanne and his excellent actors (Parker Sawyers as Barack, Tika Sumpter as Michelle) compress into a single day something broader and more meaningful than White House trivia.
Though the movie settles into a Richard Linklater-like series of conversations and encounters, it begins with the blare of Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much” on the car radio and the unmistakable feel of an ’80s movie.
“Southside With You” is, in a way, a portrait of a president-to-be as a young John Cusack.
Riding in a beat-up yellow Datsun and flicking his cigarette ash out the window, 28-year-old Barack is on his way to pick up Michelle, a 26-year-old colleague from their law firm who persistently insists that they are emphatically not on a date.
“Just another smooth-talking brother,” is Michelle’s judgment, as recited here by her mother.
The Obamas’ first encounters were, to an extent, sweetly old-fashioned. He took her to a movie. They kissed over ice cream at Baskin-Robbins.
But the film was no mere date movie; it was Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.”
And their stops include an African-American art exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago and a community meeting in a church (something incorporated here from a later date) where “Brother Barack” flashes his speechmaking skills.
They drive a little and walk a little through Chicago’s Southside, but they’re also passing through a larger cultural atmosphere. Barack is reading Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” before he leaves to pick up Michelle. Names of people killed on the streets of Chicago adorn a wall they stride past. Debate over the divisive ending of “Do the Right Thing” (when Mookie throws a trash can through Sal’s pizzeria) engulfs them outside the theater.
Sumpter and Sawyers both, against the odds, evade the trappings of impression and give natural, intimate performances about two outsiders on their way to becoming Beltway insiders.
“I’m tired of being two different people,” Michelle says of being a black woman in a white world.
They are both in the process of forming themselves, measuring their own ambitions.
The undertow of history is all around: “Something else is pulling me,” says Obama.
Inevitably, approximately half the moviegoing electorate will have little interest in “Southside With You.”
But the film is essentially devoid of politics. Its tenderness, warmth and modesty (it’s a mere 84 minutes long) is an all-the-more-welcome change of pace in this election year.
Even most of the winks you’d expect in an origin story like this aren’t heavy-handed.
Some are actually quite good. As Michelle gets ready for her date, her father hollers, ominously, “So what’s this boy’s name?”
Parker Sawyers, Tika Sumpter, Vanessa Bell Calloway and Jerod Haynes. (Brief strong language, smoking, a violent image and a drug reference)