"Don't Breathe" is like a haunted hayride. It makes your neck hair stand up and your knuckles turn white, but after delivering some creepy thrills and spooky sights, it grows tiresome and leaves you feeling like you've had your fill. This is a horror film that aims for surface-level scares. If only it tried to stimulate viewers' minds as much as their senses.
The film has a silly yet intriguing setup: Three young thieves break into a blind man's house in the hopes that he will be easy to rob. Unfortunately, he turns out to be the most badass blind guy on Earth — he's even deadlier than Daredevil. It's basically like the 1967 classic "Wait Until Dark" but with a vicious war veteran instead of Audrey Hepburn. However, "Don't Breathe" is not without a strong heroine.
Jane Levy stars as Rocky, the unspoken leader of the trio of thieves. Unlike her brash boyfriend, Money (Daniel Zovatto), she doesn't steal for sport. She simply wants to escape her circumstances, turning to crime in an effort to abandon her abusive parents and provide a better life for her little sister.
The film is about how people are driven to extremes out of desperation and how desires can mold their morals. While Rocky slowly claws out of her rut with every robbery, fellow thief Alex (Dylan Minnette) keeps tagging along in order to hopefully stir up romance between them.
The character who bends his morals the most, of course, is the blind man (Stephen Lang). He has a sympathetic backstory, losing his sight in the Gulf War and his daughter in a car accident. But he becomes a mere monster in the dark. And although he's bitter and brutal, Lang gives him a stylishly sophisticated, stately way of speaking — like the voice of a James Bond villain. It's odd and a bit off-putting.
The film is worth watching for Levy alone. She grounds it, anchoring the outlandish story with her tough yet tender performance. While Lang stumbles around like a typical slasher bogeyman, she reminds you of the heart beneath the horror. She's the light flickering in the darkness, the beacon of hope in the midst of the harrowing situations. She's no Jamie Lee Curtis, but she's definitely an engaging and memorable scream queen.
Although "Don't Breathe" is certainly a bit subtler than co-writer/director Fede Alvarez's debut, "Evil Dead," it still feels too much like a tour through a funhouse. Whenever the film seems to be heading down a more interesting path, it goes back into predictable, pulpy territory.
If you want a film to have you nervously munching on popcorn and squirming in your seat, "Don't Breathe" makes for a fun Friday night at the movies. It's a claustrophobic cat-and-mouse thriller, but it would be more unsettling if we could peek inside the cat's soul and see a little bit of ourselves. When you look into the blind man's eyes, raw humanity doesn't stare back. All you see is an abyss.
"Don't Breathe" is a taut little midnight movie, but it could have been a haunting masterwork — a film you couldn't take your eyes off of and forget.