MOVIE REVIEW – A trio of reckless teens tries to rob a blind man and inadvertently wind up trapped in his lair for the night. Fede Alvarez new movie kept us breathless in his elegant and surprisingly fast-paced blend of horror and suspense.  Alvarez makes the terror of locked doors and dark rooms more unsettling than the terrible things they hide.

While the director’s grisly “Evil Dead” remix was a true horror movie, “Don’t Breathe” has more innovative ideas under its sleeve. Early scenes shows the activities of Detroit teens Rocky (Jane Levy), a young mother, thuggish Money (Dylan Minette) and fresh-faced Alex (Daniel Zovatto), whose main activity is plundering abandoned houses.

Easy target? Yes: the robbers!

Locating a blind war veteran (Stephen Lang, “Avatar”) who hides his considerable amount of money from a legal settlement on lockdown, the team assume he’s another easy target. Instead, they find themselves against a gun-toting, crazy, muscular killer who – while being blind – still knows the inner workings of his home better than they do. Since we don’t have a real innocent hero to orient the story’s moral compass, anyone could bite the bullet.

From this basic situation, “Don’t Breathe” continues into a ruthless series of brutal showdowns, which are based around a single enticing premise: again and again, the invaders are only inches away from being spotted by the blind killer as he hunts them from room to room and their chance of escaping keep decreasing.

Don’t breathe, don’t talk

Co-written by Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, the movie has less dialogues and more frightened reaction shots as the robbers suppress their screams. Running from one room to the next, their drama borders on slapstick as each new environment presents a different physical challenge: hiding in closets, dashing through narrow crawlspaces, huddling in a locked basement and dodging a killer Rottweiler, they can’t get a break.

Production designer Naaman Marshall turns the house into a murky labyrinth brimming with new ways of confining its ill-fated characters. Pedro Luque’s shadowy cinematography creates the possibility of danger lurking at every corner, while the layered sound design leaves the characters at the mercy of every abrupt noise — from a single creaky floorboard to the wayward shard of shattered glass.

“Fucked up to rob a blind guy”

Eventually, their biggest foe is the one they took too lightly from the outset. “It’s kind of fucked up to rob a blind guy,” Alex stresses and he could not be more right. Lang’s sturdy build and blind stare make for an appealing movie monster whose every movement is a calculated attack. “Don’t Breathe” falls short of making his motives as interesting as his instincts, and that’s a problem that afflicts the rest of the movie.

Alvarez is so committed to maintaining the rapid pace that he barely gives much depth to any of his characters. Nevertheless, the movie’s so eager to please that it hardly matters, particularly when it reaches for grotesque extremes, including one odd which involves semen in a turkey baster. Though the simple plot never reaches the heights of the excellent action, suspense and pace, it hardly gets in the way of the thrills.

Alvarez’s claustrophobic setting works so effectively that any scenes taking place outside the walls of the house create the instant feeling of relief. But the eerie finale suggests that escaping from one enclosure only leads to confinement in a larger one. The ending leaves room for a sequel, but it’s not just a half-baked teaser. As with all strong horror stories, the conclusion of one dangerous scenario feeds the fear of more to come.

-BadSector-