Don't Breathe

Rating: 7/10 (4 September 2016)

VERY MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD "Don't Breathe" is not only a description of what the characters were doing in the film, but what I was doing for pretty much the entirety of it.
The set up of the film is a perfect recipe for tension. Three kids in Detroit want to rob a rich blind veteran's house so they can leave Detroit for various reasons. One of the kids, Alex, robs because he doesn't want to be alone, since his father is often absent. He wants to be with Rocky, who is pretty much his only friend it seems. Also, his father is a cop, so it allows him to help out with the legal side of things to make sure they have minimal consequences if they are caught. Money robs because it's all he can do, and he seems to enjoy it. Rocky robs so that she can get enough money to leave her abusive mother and bring her little sister with her to California. They plan to rob a rich blind veteran, expecting it to be easy money that could finally allow them to leave Detroit. Except, in a clever twist on the home invasion genre, the robbers get trapped in with this psychopathic man who attempts to murder these kids by using only 4 of his 5 senses, and his dog.
Almost the whole film takes place in the man's small house, and the film feels very claustrophobic, using many extreme close ups and smart sound design to sustain tension. The tension in the film is mostly set up through an impressive long take which follows the characters as they silently traverse the house, checking every room silently, and establishing a sense of location, while also being a very intense scene in itself which culminates with a very tense final image. From here, the film doesn't let up, and trust me when I say that. The editing gets faster and faster, the encounters get closer, and the film could surprise you in ways you wouldn't expect. Let's just say that there's serious vulnerability of the characters in the film, and it makes each scene become more and more tense when you truly believe the characters could die at any moment.
Also, the film is very respectful of it's audience, unlike many modern horror films, and doesn't try to force feed you information. Much of the film is silent, but the shot choices and subtleties in the performances explain to us the how and why. It manages to build tension better than almost any film of the past 5 years, and has almost no jump scares, except for one genuinely unexpected one that is very effective, and I don't say that often about jump scares.
If there was one thing I could honestly say the film did wrong, it was it's opening shot. The opening shot shows the blind man dragging the woman by her hair down the street, and this was pretty much completely unnecessary. You could say it helps establish a vulnerability of the characters, but it does that pretty early on even without this shot. Also, this shot makes certain scenes preceding it much less tense than they should be, because we know exactly what is going to happen.
The acting is noticeably not very good towards the beginning, but once the tension begins the performances become pretty believable, with Steven Lang being the obvious stand out here. The characters also have no development throughout the entire film, but they don't need any development. It's a very tightly written film. Pretty much everything that the characters do make sense because of who they are, where they come from, and their motivations. I don't think I'don't ever watch it again, simply because all of the enjoyment of the film comes from not knowing what is going to happen next, but I'd say it's pretty much a perfect little self contained package with a perfect cliffhanger ending. It serves its purpose (which is to make you very tense) almost as well as it possibly can.
Finally, it's actually got a pretty good message: "Some things in life you can't change, no matter how unfair they are". In other words, you just have to tough some things out and continue on with your life, because there is truly nothing you could do about it (the lady bug is a good metaphor for this philosophy).