a film without strong follow-through on its premise

Rating: 5/10 (31 August 2016)

Don't Breathe is a grisly, unpleasant exploitation film about characters that you don't like going up against a man who is at first somewhat sympathetic and then turns out to be a ridiculous mess of a (human) monster, and it's directed with some skill. I almost wish it had been made with greater sleaze or a total abandon for logic and taste and become a complete Grindhouse exercise, but the problem for me with the film is that director Fede Alvarez - again collaborating with Evil Dead producers Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert - wants to have it both ways, to have characters that, as the audience, you don't really like or have sympathy for so you don't have to worry *too* much once the psycho ex-military Zatoichi man is getting his payback... until he wants you to like them.
There's this sense in the movie that it's dancing with a grey area of having strong, morally ambiguous characterizations - you'll feel one way about the young woman Rocky and her compatriots Alex and "Money" (yeah, that's his name, like a thug on SVU or something), but maybe not everyone will feel that way until the peril and suspense and terror kicks in. That's fine, as well as it is with the antagonist (who, in the alternate movie that may exist of his story, he's the protagonist). But the problem is that the characters are set in a realistic horror-thriller situation and yet they carry that Dumb Movie Character logic that carries little logic at all.
This isn't the case for all of the film, and for the first half I was with it... up to a point. It's certainly got some logic gaps that you got to suspend disbelief for, and things like 'why if this blind ex-military man has all this money is he on the only house on a dilapidated Detroit city block with no one else living there, like out of Stephen King's Roadwork or something. And the filmmaker and his DP carry a lot of heft when it comes to the direction and the look of the film: they know how to bring an audience in by moving the camera in creative ways, having staging that makes sense, and pacing (in these early scenes) that makes things intense for us just as much as the characters... again, up to a point.
And then the movie decides to... well, here's where spoilers kick in: the guy (he doesn't have a name so Sgt Hartman-Zatoichi works well) is not simply some old dude living by his lonesome having lost a daughter to a fatal hit and run. No, he has his special set of I-can-kill-you-with-my-hands-or-my-guns, AND more than that is the reveal that in his basement there's a lair for the woman who hit his daughter who... he is also keeping locked up as she is knocked up with his child so that he can replace his dead daughter and... this comes into play even more terrifyingly in the last minutes when the girl Rocky gets in his grasp and... Jesus Christ movie! It's around here, or just before give or take around the moment when you think a character's been stabbed with a pair of gardening shears but it's revealed he is still alive(?!) (and this after seemingly to already be dead from a no-one-survives-that-s*** fall through a window), that the movie goes into Full Stupid and lazy territory.
Again, I wish that if Don't Breathe leaped into completely crazy and bonkers terrain, but it doesn't have the courage for that; it's caught in this nexus of trying to be a legitimately creepy and fearful experience done with direction that tries to sometimes call back to things like Fincher's Panic Room (also a 'bottle' one-location scenario), and being a movie with full on exploitation (the title recalls for me Edgar Wright's DON'T trailer from the actual Grindhouse experience), featuring characters we don't care about that are basically drawn (though with some real emotion from the actress playing Rocky) and thrown into nightmarish, violent set pieces.
I don't like when a filmmaker cheats me with information that's dealt out to me. I don't like having the rug pulled out from under me even if it's something that I should take for granted like a character survives something they shouldn't of or a character doesn't kill someone when they have ample opportunity to (you'll know the moment, or moments, when they come). I leave Don't Breathe feeling rather empty and angry instead of elated, which terrifying movies can do - see Green Room earlier this year, also about characters caught way in over their heads, for a much greater example of this - but its ugliness is in multiple ways: in how it treats rape and sexual assault (it ends up being a cheap out to having a stronger 2nd/3rd act), in how it treats bodily wounds (come on man), the logic of having a home security system at all if there's, you know, a RAPE DUNGEON in your basement, and how it treats sound design. Yes, for a movie like this the sound design gets weak after a while.