Don't Bother: 'Don't Breathe' Icks More Than It Spooks

Fede Alvarez is back at again, following up his 2013 remake of Evil Dead with another attempt at shredding the nerves of viewers, this time eschewing Kandarian demons for a pissed-off blind man whose Detroit house is like a fortress of paranoid terror, and subbing three teen-ish robbers for a group of intervention-bound friends. That remake had some stellar gore, generally likable characters, and a playfulness to its gruesomeness — but none of those things are found in Don't Breathe. (Read the roundtable discussion Jim Ridley and I had about Evil Dead '13 for further musings.)

Worry sets in within the first 10 minutes, which are filled with staggering amounts of, as in Evil Dead '13, heavy-handed backstory (or the signifying shortcuts that modern screenwriting guides posit as such) and terrible dialogue. Rocky (Jane Levy, back from ED13) has a young daughter and a deadbeat Mom with a neo-Nazi (or maybe he'd prefer "alt-right") boyfriend and a super-significant tattoo — all of which we absolutely need to know so we don't question how unsympathetic these kids are.

Worse is the case of Alex (Dylan Minnette, from last year's better-than-you-might-have-thought Goosebumps movie), the enabler for the trio's thefts, who seems to actually care about the security guard father he routinely steals house keys from. Alex has a code, but chucks it aside because he cares about Rocky. Unfortunately, the third member of the trio is Money, who is a piece-of-shit, barely written character who exists to escalate the situation in all the wrong ways at all times.

The big, insurmountable problem is that Don't Breathe is trying to have its metaphorical cake and eat it too, making its ersatz Bling Ring the plucky heroes just trying to get out of Detroit and set out for California, but also letting the film be a reactionary fantasy for anyone tired of the Other trying to take their livelihood — there's no doubt that someone wanting to see disrespectful foul-mouthed youths die for crossing an old white man's path will find a lot to enjoy here as well. This schism just grows wider and wider during the film's admirably brief running time, until by the end you really have no idea what it's trying to say. It's an incoherent text that aims for sensation and visceral response by the often ickiest means.

The thieves' desperation to escape their lives in Michigan seems dilettantish at best, especially considering that they're trying to steal the financial settlement the aforementioned blind veteran (Stephen Lang) received for the death of his daughter. That's usually a warning sign in any film — if the ostensible protagonists are up to something fairly morally queasy, there's got to be a reveal later on that justifies it. The film's very first shot pretty much lets you know that it's going to turn into a Jack Ketchum novel at some point, and when it does, it is with an unappealing relish that breaks the film completely.

Things are going to get very, very spoileriffic (including the ending) from here on out. You've been warned.

This movie is super gross (not gory, but ideologically) and triggering as hell. It isn't technically a rape-revenge movie, but that somehow makes it even more reprehensible. In fact, a character says “I'm not a rapist” while preparing to forcibly penetrate another character. It's the narrative equivalent of a “well, actually” tweet, and it is emblematic of how every aspect of this film is just a series of signifiers meant to motivate a future action or reaction. "Isn't that what screenwriting is?" you might ask — but no, it's mapmaking. It's using visceral horror to make the viewer feel extra disgusting for having any kind of empathic response.

Alvarez's sadistic tendencies as director and co-writer seem even more grotesque when divorced from the supernatural, and the second half of Don't Breathe is unbelievably unpleasant. He has an exemplary gift for orchestrating tension, and a sustained sequence in monochrome gray "night vision" is a masterpiece of unrelenting and increasing unease. But he wants this to be a complicated human drama with big reversals and even bigger screams. This may honestly be grosser than Lights Out's indefensible “people with debilitating clinical depression should just kill themselves and set their families free” ending, if only because Don't Breathe seems determined to victimize Rocky again and again. That the film ends with Rocky and her daughter leaving for California only after learning that the Old Man is still alive may have been meant as a stinger to goose the audience one last time — a “you thought he was dead but guess what” flourish as in the slasher idiom — but instead it just feels like a sick, far-too-realistic reminder that Rocky will never be able to feel safe. It's a huge tonal misstep in a film that makes tonal missteps about every 20 minutes.

Alvarez can make whatever kind of movie he wants. But as someone who enjoys horror for imagination and catharsis, I think he's on his own after this one. 

Don't Breathe opens today in theaters everywhere.