Don't Breathe

Pleasure. The American dream is dead and blind. Want to shoot a relevant horror movie today? Go to Detroit, the set pieces are free. Don't Breathe is not as sophisticated as It Follows, but its game with genre proprieties is incredibly masterful. Brilliant work with space, economical and ambivalent motivation of characters, amazing physiognomy of Stephan Lang, pleasantly full sound component, solid work with the motif of limited senses (although the film tweaks the perception of the blind man from time to time as needed)... everything I need to spend an intense 90 minutes in the dark. After the hollow remake of Evil Dead, Fede delivered the thoroughbred and healthy self-confident insemination that the genre needed in the same way a Rottweiler needs gossiping. P. S. Don't Breathe is an interesting response to Gran Torino. (2016-09-09)

Finally, a properly suspense-filled haunted house without ghosts. And one jump-scare that will give you a heart attack. I wonder how many viewers will realize that the butcher is played by the famous villain from Avatar. The youngsters are also A-listers and the whole production is top rate. Sam Raimi is a guarantee of quality. They were probably attracted to the creepy sites of Detroit ghost-town by the recent delicious It Follows. The movie makes surviving difficult for the characters while making many a genre cliché sweat (and bleed). The point of the film is half-baked, but we can forgive that. (2016-10-04)

An imaginative combination of suspense aesthetics and cinematic action, a satisfyingly explosive and effective spectacle in a contained setting with minimal characters, devoid of genre predictability and pitting interesting anti-heroes against each other in an open-ended game of survival; all without plot digressions, superfluous dialogues and reprehensible clichés. An excellent and scary Stephen Lang, a likeable Jane Levy. The ending is a bit unnecessarily drawn out just to force all the hinted motives into the desired denouement, and there are some serious questions about the logic, but that doesn't change the fact that Alvarez succeeded and convinced me once again that horror filmmakers can still find fertile ground. (2016-09-06)

Fede Alvarez really captured my attention since Panic Attack!. But at the time, I had no idea that his creative skills would take a turn towards Sam Raimi and Timur Rodrigez. I am not saying that it’s bad, I just think that he could do better. That is very visible in this movie. Even though it pretends to be a horror movie, I would describe it rather as a thriller with illogical situations similar to those in horror movies. In this case, though, I don’t really care because the movie is mostly about the idea and the atmosphere, so it is fine when the director helps himself out with some illogicality. For example, I have to say that two of the three thieves in this movie have nine lives like a cat, because what they survive would be impossible even for Chuck Norrisʼs third cousin. But well... yeah, at least there is something to watch. (2016-12-31)

At last! A horror/thriller which doesn't send a bunch of students into the woods to die. It just sends three thieves to fight a blind war veteran. The film has a very decent plot, a great suspenseful atmosphere, and a fair amount of brutality and insemination. The only thing that didn't work for me was the attempt to convince me that if you steal to give your little sister a better life you are actually in the right. For me personally, the main good guy was the blind man who was just trying to defend his property from invasion by local raiders. I enjoyed the film from start to finish. (2016-11-15)