There’s a scene with a dog late in Don’t Breathe that captures, in miniature, everything remarkable about the movie. It’s like Cujo condensed, the terror of being trapped in a confined space by a vicious animal smushed into a few surgical slices of time. Every move Rocky (Jane Levy) makes is captured with a precision that’s consistently breathtaking. It’s not just the one sequence, either. Don’t Breathe strings together scene after scene of some of the most astounding suspense yet seen in this generation of horror, like a terrible engine designed by a team of engineers to brutalize teenagers.
Don’t Breathe opens on our young master criminals—Rocky, Alex (Dylan Minnette) and Money (Daniel Zovatto)—as they bust into yet another home. They’ve got a good racket going: Alex’s dad works for a security company, so they let themselves in and make it look like an aggressive break-in on the way out.
Cue the teen version of the one last score. A blind veteran in a dumpy house in an abandoned Detroit neighborhood may have hundreds of thousands stashed away. It’s enough money for Money to blow off his scammy fence, for Rocky to run off to California with her little sister and for Alex to impress Rocky.
Things don’t go as planned. This isn’t just any blind man, this is Stephen Lang: the ripped, white-haired hardass who almost won the battle for Pandora with just a mech suit and a big knife. As the blind veteran Lang is terrifying. In bed he looks withered, his eyes scratched out pink craters, his body hunched and wasted. His arms tell a different story; his biceps look like Rob Liefeld pinned his Captain America arms on Iggy Pop.
Early into their heist he catches them in the act and violence is deployed with a shocking efficiency. What follows is a harrowing and utterly logical fight through all three floors of the house, as The Blind Man hunts down the would-be crooks with a startling brutality. Though it shares the same essential plot, Don’t Breathe is The People Under the Stairs' (Wes Craven’s 1991 horror-comedy) complete tonal opposite.
Don’t Breathe’s precision extends to its characters and politics. This is a movie about poor teenagers against a disabled, neglected veteran after all. It’s the lower class given no other option than to tear into each other in a battle for survival. That Don’t Breathe sides with the young thugs gives the movie a bit of a subversive thrill. You can imagine how the media will spin such a story—Blind War Hero Defeats Home Invaders!—so it’s fun to spend the movie with the relatable criminal element. The feeling that the characters are more like chess pieces than humans is hard to shake, but even if they don't become fully fleshed characters, the excellent cast does an exceptional job of acting very, very scared and desperate.
Fede Alvarez, who last directed the capable but unnecessary Evil Dead remake, demonstrates a control over each moment that’s astoundingly rare in genre films. Every shot feels purposeful, remorsefully pushing the teenagers and The Blind Man toward their ultimate fates (Alvarez gets away with unbelievable outrages, buying each one with believable escalation).
It’s hard to say much more than that. Don’t Breathe is a horror movie that should be studied by anyone interested in building suspense and terror, or anyone just after some rad palm scars from clenching their hands too tightly.
