Don’t Breathe

Life in Michigan is so shit for twenty-somethings Rocky (Jane Levy), Money (Daniel Zovatto) and Alex (Dylan Minette) that they embark upon a series of house robberies in order to fund their relocation to, and standard of living in, California. Or least, life is shit enough for Rocky to risk it all for a way out – her mother’s the personification of white trash, her step-father-in-waiting sports swastika tattoos, and her prepubescent sister (or maybe stepsister) is looking at another decade of deprivation if Rocky doesn’t make something happen.

Is life shit for Money? Who knows? He’s what a filmmaker bordering on his forties thinks a millennial in thrall to the thug life acts like. He postures and seems to enjoy criminality and thinks he’s a big man for packing a gun. He refers to said item as “chrome”. That’s all you really need to know about Money. That and the fact that he calls himself “Money”.

Is life shit for Alex? Not really. His dad owns a financially successful home security business that, with a modicum of application and self-discipline, he could be running himself in a decade’s time. But wait, Alex is hung up on Rocky even though she’s Money’s girl (I was a little bit sick in my mouth just typing that sentence), and therefore he risks the most, ripping off the spare keys and alarm codes to various moneyed homesteads.

The heists this threesome pull follow the same pattern: they let themselves in with the spare key, deprogram the alarm, steal enough in saleable goods (never cash) that if they’re caught it’ll be a misdemeanour rather than serious jail time, let themselves out, then hurl a stone through the window to trigger the alarm (thus drawing attention away from Alex’s father’s company) as they make their getaway.

So far so good. At least Rocky has been given motivation and a reason to risk it all. Granted, there’s not quite enough frisson between them to justify Alex’s infatuation, but Levy is an attractive and charismatic enough presence that you can believe he’d carry a torch. Still, Alex of all of them has the most to lose and takes the biggest risk for the smallest yield, so already the film strains credulity purely it needs to explain how these tweenie-robbers can bypass alarm codes.

(Seriously, all Alex needs to do is wait till Money gets hauled off to jail – he’s stupid enough for said outcome to be a foregone conclusion – get her hired at his old man’s firm, put a deposit on a place of their own and be a good uncle to Rocky’s baby sis and it’s happy ever after.)

But this is the kind of movie in which the characters are smart and resourceful when the script needs them to evade a particular situation and utterly fucking stupid when the script needs them to get caught. And everything in ‘Don’t Breathe’ develops because the script requires it rather than as a result of decisions made by characters who are, y’know, acting in character.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After an archetypal robbery from which our so-called heroes get away clean, director Fede Alvarez and his co-writer Rodo Sayagues, establish the set up with commendable efficiency: in a depressed area of town, where virtually every property in the immediate vicinity stands empty, a Gulf War veteran, blinded during said conflict, lives in hermit-like solitude. He also stubbornly remains in an economically depressed urban wasteland when the out-of-court settlement from the rich family whose scion his daughter in a drink driving accident has swelled his personal wealth to the tune of almost half a million. A sum that he keeps, in cash, on the premises.

Money, pissed off with fencing the proceeds from previous jobs at a 60% loss on their street value, gets a tip off re: the blind man. Yup, Stephen Lang’s terrifying and brilliantly portrayed character isn’t even given a name. Alex is concerned that it’s a heist too far, but at the risk of losing contact with Rocky acquiesces. The trio wait till after dark, drug the blind man’s dog and break in. Things go south PDQ.

For an all-too-short while, ‘Don’t Breathe’ offers the unalloyed pleasure of a handicapped but still brutally efficient military professional putting every bit of his training, tradecraft and expertise to the test in order to outwit and viciously repel his attackers. Had ‘Don’t Breathe’ continued in this vein – robbers who aren’t necessarily the bad guys suddenly finding themselves targeted by a homeowner who isn’t necessarily the victim – it could have been the subversive genre-redefining home invasion thriller of its time.

As it is, Alvarez throws in a plot twist that dimps the first of several plot holes in the fabric of the film. It’s pretty effective when you’re sitting there in a darkened cinema and everyone else in the auditorium has gasped, but after a moment or two’s reflection it throws up too many unanswered questions. Yes, I can dig that a guy who’s lost his sight would use certain aspects of his military training to overcome his disability; that he’d still have lightning-fast reflexes; and that he’d know the layout of his house down to the last inch of crawlspace. But the big secret his house is hiding … now, that’s entirely different set of logistics. And surely there would have been a police investigation and given his relationship to … But to say anymore would necessitate spoilers.

Which I’m sorely tempted to throw out, because it’s this aspect of the film that transitions ‘Don’t Breathe’ from tense-as-all-hell cat-and-mouse thriller into grubbier territory. As Rocky is separated from her companions, the woman-in-peril scenario takes on a luridly sexual implication. Thereafter, false escapes and recaptures pile up alongside back-from-the-dead moments at a pace frenetic enough to strain credulity even further, not to mention Lang’s visually-challenged antagonist seeming to morph from ruthlessly proficient but still blind ex-soldier treating his home as a battleground, to a fifty-something Michael Myers popping up out of nowhere for maximum scare effective and never mind whether it was physically possible for him to get from location A to location B in anything like the time implied.

Throw on top of this a scene that Alvarez and Sayagues concocted purely for the gross-out factor and its painfully clear that they weren’t confident about being able to sustain suspension and tension for the film’s 89-minute running time and compensated with juvenile torture porn tropes. Which is a damned shame, since ‘Don’t Breathe’ works beautifully as an exercise in tension, with some exemplary sound work. The house is a brilliant creation, and the performances range from decent to very good, with Lang and Levy taking top honours. With its misconceived subplot snipped out and the running time reduced to 75 minutes, it would have been a nerve-shredder of the highest order.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #3: It Follows

There was one of those storm-in-a-teacup kerfuffles on social media recently when Quentin Tarantino said of David Robert Mitchell’s sophomore feature ‘It Follows’ that “it’s one of those movies that’s so good that you start getting mad at it for not being great”. QT went on to enumerate some of the issues, his main gripe being that Mitchell was inconsistent as regards the film’s mythology. There are those who took umbrage at Tarantino’s opinionism. Personally, I think he was being charitable.

The basic concept of ‘It Follows’ is that there’s a curse, or a haunting, or something (Mitchell’s savvy enough not to get bogged down in exposition) that is passed on through sexual encounters. Once you’ve received it, you become aware of people – they might be male or female, strangers or family members, they might appear to be alive or bear the disfigurements of death – following you relentlessly; unstoppably. If they catch up with you, it’s goodnight Vienna. The only way to break the curse, or dispel the haunting, or whatever is to have sex with someone else. Only that doesn’t entirely guarantee you a “get out of being killed” waiver. If the individual you’ve passed it onto doesn’t get rid of it by the same means before the follower catches up with them – if, in other words, they’re killed – the curse, or haunting, or summat starts working its way back down the chain.

Which, admittedly, is a pretty good concept. Particularly the idea of the follower doing a u-turn and working its way back. Thread this through an acutely observed picture of teenagers on the cusp of discovering their sexual identities and dealing with the accompanying emotional rollercoaster, and – pace Tarantino – there was no reason for this not to be something special. The problems start with the very first shot …

… which looks for all the world like a screengrab from John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’. And for the next hour and a half Mitchell only pauses in his wholesale plundering of Carpenter’s seasonal classic in order to nick a few other bits from David Lynch. Even the music (by Disasterpiece) is a film-long riff on the ‘Halloween’ soundtrack except in one place where it throws in an homage to Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ (‘The Exorcist’) and a few others where the order of the day is some discordant atonality a la ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’.

The problems continue with the very first line of dialogue and continue through to the last. Not the dialogue itself, I hasten to add – Mitchell often gives his teenagers interesting and thoughtful things to say, and allows that some teens will have read T.S. Eliot and Dostoyevsky and not everyone under the age of twenty-five has to act like a douchebag – but the sound recording. The music is intrusive, the foley only slightly less so, and the dialogue is often helplessly lost in the mix. I had to replay a few scenes, and some others I gave up on.

The performances are variable: as protagonist Jay, Maika Monroe has a winsome and haunted look about her that suits the narrative, but she sleepwalks much of the film. Lili Sepe as her sister Kelly and Olivia Luccardi as their friend Yara seem more at home with their characters, but are given very little to work with. Keir Gilchrist and Daniel Zovatto, as romantic rivals over Jay, create just enough by way of characterization to keep themselves afloat. Only Jake Weary as Hugh, the love rat who gives Jay the curse/haunting/whatever actually invests himself in a performance and goes for broke: the scene where the gang confront him and he sweatily tries to justify himself, warn Jay to pass it on, and absent himself before anything nasty happens (all within the space of a couple of minutes) is the best-acted moment in the movie, Weary single handedly creating a dynamic and a sense of urgency.

Elsewhere, the characters veer between acting like normal (if utterly unnerved and bemused) teenagers, then doing stupid character-in-a-horror-movie things purely because the script needs them to. There are other moments that are just plain awkward, such as Jay driving as far as she can in an attempt to escape her follower, then having to stop and get some sleep. Now, you’re being pursued by something weird and unstoppable; you’re driving a car; you just can’t keep going. Do you: (a) find somewhere off the road and out of sight, trigger the internal locking system, slide the front seats forward and huddle into the backseat footwell, hoping no-one will see you should they happen across the vehicle; or (b) stop the car right on the edge of the road, get out, curl up on the bonnet and go to sleep? It’s (a), isn’t it? Every time. Mais non! Jay, who has hitherto made very well-considered decisions, opts for (b), a course of action guaranteed to see you robbed, possibly assaulted and your car absconded with, and that’s quite without any supernatural threat! 

Ultimately it’s this unholy trinity – too many borrowings from other directors’ work (which is fine if, like Tarantino, you fashion them into your own authorial style); inconsistency in the film’s internal logic; and ostensibly smart characters suddenly and pointlessly doing stupid things – that work against the film. ‘It Follows’ has a lot of promise and some intensely memorable moments – an opening scene spatially dislocated by a dizzying and entirely unexpected 360° pan; an exploring-an-abandoned-house sequence that builds its menace from social realism and avoids the obvious scaremongering; a beachside idyll that explodes into supernatural horror – and there’s enough to suggest that once Mitchell develops his own filmmaking style he’ll be a force to be reckoned with. But its weaknesses stack up mightily, particularly its puppyish obsession with mimicking ‘Halloween’. ‘It Follows’ isn’t bad – it isn’t bad at all – but it’s still the work of a beginner. To continually call to mind and allow itself to be judged against ‘Halloween’ – the work of a master – is a huge aesthetic miscalculation.