Movie Review: Don’t Breathe Is The Return Of Old School Thriller

The slasher film takes you through a fantastic ride filled with twists and turns

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Movie Review: Don’t Breathe Is The Return Of Old School Thriller



Making slasher films is a difficult task. For one, directors can’t go overboard with violence on screen for fear of a backlash. The storylines of slasher flicks have traditionally been wafer thin, so nobody’s kicked up about reinventing the wheel. Every slasher movie that releases stands the risk of being an old-wine-in-a-new-bottle which doesn’t even cater to the first word of the genre that it’s from. So, a film like Don’t Breathe is very, very good news for this genre.

Don’t Breathe begins with a story that’ll have you yawning. Three young losers, Rocky (Jane Levy), Alex (Dylan Minnette) and Money (Daniel Zovatto) decide to burgle the house of an ex-Army guy, Norman Nordstrom (Stephen Lang) who has loads of cash. That cash comes from a litigation settlement of his daughter’s death.


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Just when you think this is going to be boring, scriptwriters Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues take you through a journey, with twists and turns, which is bound to leave you gasping for breath in the end. This is a unique film that has a strong script and also enough texture to its characters to have the audience root for them. Pedro Luque’s breathless, suffocating camera angles are just the thing that the doctor ordered for this script.

The scriptwriters are pulling no punches when it comes to the action sequences too. These action sequences work well towards creating The Blind Man as a worthy antagonist. Surprise, brutal assaults are the order of the night here. One of the aims of slasher flicks is to offend and Don’t Breathe succeeds in creating a puke-worthy sequence. After all, who uses turkey baster in a 2016 film! For the uninitiated, turkey baster is artificial insemination at its most archaic.


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Performances are strictly okay but they don’t really jar because it’s Stephen Lang on whose burly shoulders the film stands, and he delivers as the Blind Man. He has a screen presence that works well for the movie.

Don’t Breathe gears up post the interval though and the beginning of the film isn’t the tautest of script-writing. That’s the only negative we can come up with for this otherwise entertaining flick.

Watch this one.




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