A decent thriller that could have been better

Rating: 8/10 (19 November 2016)

"Don't Breathe" is a passable Monster-in-the-House thriller. It has grossed $152.5MM on a budget of $9.9MM and has garnered generally favorable reviews, so it's difficult to argue with success.
It has several strong elements. Stephen Lang delivers a strong performance. The setting is the creepiest dilapidated home I've seen in a movie since "Silence of the Lambs," although I'm not a huge fan of horror films, so haven't seen that many. The lighting and cinematography are excellent. The film relies heavily on Steadicam shots, most of which are coupled with camera movements which are executed smoothly, so don't distract too greatly. Some shots are rock solid and the camera often seems to float effortlessly through space. But there some shots would have been improved if the camera were mounted on some sort of rigid support.
However, I had three issues with the film.
First, it lacked any eroticism or sexiness. A love triangle with a nerdish nice guy competing against a bad boy for a girl's affection propels the inciting incident, but the relationships seem tepid and better suited to some film from the Code Period. One scene that touches on sexual assault distances itself so thoroughly from any form of eroticism or nudity as to seem positively weird and not in a frightening or creepy manner. Perhaps the victim would be frightened, but the scene was so hopelessly contrived to avoid showing anything that it shattered my willful suspension of disbelief, preventing me from feeling any empathy for the character.
My second objection concerns dramatic structure. The basic paradigm for horror films involves a sinful act that unleashes a vengeful, often supernatural force that punishes the guilty, but often spares an innocent. To fit the paradigm, a character who didn't survive would have had to survive and a character who survived should have perished. Consequently, the film lacked a coherent moral.
Third, obvious evidence of offences and an individual's involvement are ignored. Eventually, outsiders attempt to understand what happened. All sorts of clues are left lying about that even Inspector Clouseau would notice and question, and yet they seem to be ignored. This seems to have been done to facilitate a sort of feel-good ending, but the ending doesn't quite feel good due to the second issue described above.
For me, these shortcomings prevented the film from having as great an emotional impact as it could have had.