Outlandish But An Effective And Suspenseful Thriller

Rating: 8/10 (20 August 2018)

Perhaps the best thing about "Don't Breathe" is the twist that takes place and leaves you wondering who - if anyone - you should be rooting for. For the first half of the movie, this is a pretty standard type of home invasion story. Three teenagers have made a career of sorts breaking into houses. As the story begins they've decided to target a blind man (a helpless blind man!) who they believe has a huge amount of money hidden inside his house. Well, it turns out that the blind man isn't quite as helpless as we might have thought. Things go wrong inside the house pretty fast. You start to expect a sort of cat and mouse thriller as this blind man sets out to get these no good kids. Except ... I don't want to give it away. Suffice to say there are a lot of secrets inside this blind man's house - enough that by the end you don't really know who the good guys are - or even if there is a good guy. It's a good (if outlandish) story, full of twists and turns that keeps you guessing pretty much the entire way through.
Director Fede Alvarez did a good job with the setting, using the house - dark, mysterious and foreboding (because what would a blind man need with light anyway) - and its' neighbourhood - one of Detroit's abandoned neighbourhoods, with this blind man being the only one left in about a four square block radius, if I remember correctly. So, whether inside or outside the house, it's pretty isolated. The performances were very good. Stephen Lang was superb as the blind man, and I thought Jane Levy was very good as Rocky - the most sympathetic of the three teens, perhaps because we know the most about her home life, which isn't happy and which she dreams of escaping with her little sister.
There's no doubt that the plot is, indeed, outlandish - but the story is exciting and it has a lot of suspense. The ending of the movie clearly sets up a sequel, which has already been announced - which suggests to me that they're going to take the blind man too far. But who knows. Maybe it will work. This film did work - and it worked very well. (8/10)