Don’t Breathe is a story about three young opportunistic burglars who carry out small robberies on houses in the Detroit area as one of the group Alex (Dylan Minette) has a father who runs a home security company so he has managed to gain access to the keys and security codes for said houses. He is joined in this spree by Rocky (Jane Levy) a young mother who wants to gather enough cash to allow her escape from her situation living with her abusive mother (Katia Bokor) and current man (Sergej Onopko) who treat her with disdain. The third member of the group is Money (Daniel Zovatto), the street wise, hard man of the group who is doing the burglaries for fun as well as for financial gain. They always keep the takings small scale so as to stay under the radar and this is working well until Money receives word about a potential hit on a man, Norman Nordstrom (Stephen Lang) who has received a large cash settlement after the death of his daughter.

When they scope the house and realise he is blind it seems too good to be true as he is living alone in an isolated, run down part of town. However Norman is an army veteran so once they enter the house they find that it is going to be more difficult that imagined as the security is beyond what they expected, still they continue on unperturbed but when their plan to ensure the home owner stays asleep using gas is ruined as Money produces a gun and shoots the lock on a door which he believes the cash is stored behind this alerts Norman to their presence and transforms the act from home invasion to armed robbery so the stakes are escalated beyond their previous escapades and it turns into a stand off of sorts as he is unsure exactly who is in his home but has correctly guessed that they are looking for his cash.

Director Fede Alvarez, who also gave us the decent remake of the Evil Dead movie a few years back, uses great camerawork with good tracking shots, quick cuts, shaky camera and the use of POV in some scenes which all really add tension and the since most of the movie has a very claustrophobic feel, taking place in real time it adds a great sense of realism to the situation. The switch from the burglars being the bad guys to you rooting for them to escape is done both cleverly and subtly that it’s hard to think back to at which point your brain makes the switch as both sides are essentially the bad guys.  While the overall plausibility of the movie is a little far fetched if really analysed it’s one of those stories which has enough elements of possibility that make you think, what if that actually happened? The jump scares are appropriate and do catch you unawares plus there’s a scene with possibly the best use of night vision cameras since Silence Of The Lambs.

All three intruders get their time on screen and are flashed out reasonably well but both Minette and in particular Levy get the majority of the moments to shine and Levy does a great job often acting by facial expression alone which deserves credit. However, Stephen Lang is the real star of the show here as the blind veteran who makes the house an almost unescapable fortress where every movement and sound potentially alerts him to where the intruders are located. His screen presence made him feel threatening despite his disability and as we learn during the progression of the film, he may be blind but he is far from helpless. So, as the intruders are forced to take more and more desperate measures in an attempt to escape they begin to realise just how dangerous he really is. One thing I did notice was that he seems to have enhanced senses such as smell at one moment but not at other times and in a similar vein his hearing seemed to go from almost super human to average which made some scenes a little unbelievable but this is not the fault of the actor and he gives a Tour De Force performance here.

I did have a few issues with some elements of the movie as I thought that the motivations of Alex were a little weak as, despite the obvious attraction he had towards Rocky the lengths he is going to seem a little extreme for a guy who outwardly, looks to generally be on the straight and narrow. Also, the ending was a little disappointing in comparison to the rest of the movie as it seemed to drag on and the movie could have been about fifteen minutes shorter. On the plus side, once the movie hits the point where all the characters are inside the house it really was a tense situation and there were some real edge of your seat moments when you almost found yourself shouting at the screen, which doesn’t happen to me often.

I found a lot of similarities to the movie Green Room from earlier this year but where that took a more visceral approach to the ‘no escape’ situation this movie has a more subtle build up to its climax. While not an out and out horror movie in the classic descriptive there’s enough to give it a borderline entry into the genre so it most certainly deserves a mention and continues the resurgence of generally good horror films which have hit the screens so far this year.

DJ Speaks Rating: 7 Out Of 10