Don't Breathe (2016)

One of the things I have realized that separates James Wan from many of the other film makers these days in Horror is that he knows to make us care. He gives us flesh and blood characters and takes the time to give us reasons to care about these people. His recent The Conjuring 2 ran for a longer duration than most horror films (2 hours and 14 minutes), but a good amount of that time was character building. We had to care about the family to have sufficient care and fear for their well being. Unless the creative minds are only interested in giving the viewer a blood bath, we need to be invested in the characters.

This is a crucial element to these films, and one that Don't Breathe was daring enough to take a gamble on as to what makes us like our characters in peril. For some people this gamble will fall flat on its face, for others it will be a strong point of the movie and one to be respected.

The movie has a basic set-up: three friends (Rocky, Money, and Alex) in Detroit who are burglars decide to break into the house of an older person to steal the money he was recently awarded in the wrongful death of his daughter. This, however, is just the outer layer of an extremely layered movie that keeps your allegiance switching.

When we first meet our three friends we are in the middle of a burglary. In this scene we are given reasons to dislike the friends along with the simple fact that they are criminals(one of them urinates all over the house). But right after this scene it is established that they are doing these robberies as a way to escape the Hell that Detroit is portrayed as, and to escape the Hell that one of them lives in (she has a verbally, possibly physically, abusive and neglectful mother and a little sister caught in the Hell).

So now we are stuck with an internal conflict. As we get to know the characters we come to understand them and their motives. We are able to empathize with them. They have a moral code to what they do (aside from Money, played by Daniel Zovatto) and are only in the crimes to get just what they need. They refuse to take money until this job comes along, but they intend this to be the last. The fact that Alex (Dylan Minnette) and Rocky (Jane Levy) seem like decent enough people stuck in an ugly world is what the movie is hoping to make stick in your head.

Once inside the house Money spies on the old man, who is sleeping. In this scene we have a sympathy for the man. We find out just before we break into the house that he is blind, and seeing him sleeping peacefully works on our psyche quite well. We fear for the old man at this moment, even if we have seen the commercials and know that he will be turning into something entirely different.

This is also another area that the movie succeeds on. If you have seen the commercials you probably have it in your head that the blind man (as his name is in the credits) is a soulless killing machine. This is not so true. The blind man is played with staggering intensity, void of almost all dialogue until we get a short little explanation out of him, by Stephen Lang. The fact that Lang is 62 years old is amazing, considering his build in this movie is that of a brick wall. But the blind man also has a very, very, very dark side, but believes he is doing right and that he, in his own words, is "not a monster."

We spend our movie torn between fear for our friends in peril, and yet at the same time wondering if we should be so worried about them, as they are criminals themselves. But do they deserve this? Then we are torn thinking that the blind man has a right to defend his house, but then the other secrets appear and we don't want to stand too close to him, but then he states his case, and we can kind of understand his pain a bit, but not that much.

The whole dang movie is a tug of war on loyalties for the spectator. The movie shows us that everybody has a skeleton or two (and some of those skeletons might be quite vile) or that good and evil aren't always so easy to decipher.

Now, that isn't to say that this will be the case for everybody. Some people might just as easily watch this film, meet our motley crew, and decide that they all are rotten examples of people and be turned off by the fact that we have to spend time with them. The only really innocent character (aside from the little sister) is the blind man's dog, but even that is an instrument of terror in the movie.

Don't Breathe is an extremely powerful and brutal movie. The viewer is on the edge of their seat within 10 minutes of starting. How powerful of a film it is emotionally for the viewer depends 100% on your acceptance of spending time with criminals and if you are able to find sympathy or empathy for people who make a living our of ruining the lives of others.

I liked it a good amount, but that internal struggle is what keeps me from going for full marks. I am still not sure how I felt about the people, and wasn't as wrapped up in their future as I am with certain other films. At the end I didn't have the relief or anger that I might have had if I had been completely invested in the safety of somebody. As it was it ended with a shrug of my shoulders and a thought of "O.K., good luck," and that was about it.

(By the way, there are a lot of similarities between this and The Collector. Both deal with people trapped in a house, a silent killer, bad guys portrayed as good guys because they do what they do for possible good reasons. The Collector got a slightly higher mark for its ridiculous over the top side.)

*** 1/2 our of *****