Ask most film fans about Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez and they’ll probably mention his English language debut, the ultra-gory and surprisingly satisfying 2013 remake of The Evil Dead. Or they might talk about his less commercially successful Steig Larsson adaptation The Girl in the Spider’s Web. And that makes sense, as those are both well-known properties.
But they should also declare their love for the original film Álvarez squeezed between Evil Dead and The Spider’s Web, the 2016 home invasion masterpiece Don’t Breathe.
Home invasion movies may not get as much love as zombie flicks or slashers, but they comprise perhaps the most relatable horror sub-genre. We’ve all heard strange sounds in night, and when we crawl out of bed to investigate, we don’t expect a Xenomorph or a dream demon… but we do fear a stranger in the house.
Classics like Wait Until Dark (1967) and even The Strangers (2008) have received plenty of critical attention (and deservedly so), but while it won genre awards upon its release, Don’t Breathe still isn’t properly celebrated for the way it perfects the home invasion model.
Written by Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, part of the movie’s strength comes from the way it twists the formula by making the invaders into the protagonists. Using information from his father’s home security business, Alex (Dylan Minnette), along with his unrequited crush Rocky (Jane Levy) and her braggart boyfriend Money (Daniel Zovatto), burgles houses for items to be fenced by a local criminal. Tired of the small payouts from these jobs, the crew sets their sights on the Blind Man (Stephen Lang), a grieving veteran rumored to be holding a $300,000 wrongful death payout someplace inside his house.
Kids stealing from the elderly aren’t the most likable heroes, and while Álvarez never justifies their actions, he does give them context. Making excellent use of the film’s post-recession Detroit setting, Álvarez shows us the desperate plight of the characters, especially Levy’s Rocky. Staying with her abusive mother and drunken step-father only to protect her younger sister Didi, Rocky sees the money as her one chance to escape with Didi to California. Even Money, the most grating of the three, comes off less like a hardened criminal and more like a young man fronting to compensate for his lack of options.
But even as it builds empathy for the characters it develops, Don’t Breathe doesn’t let them completely off the hook. In his initial scenes, Lang plays the Blind Man as an emotionally and physically broken shut-in. We first see him sleeping in a disheveled bed, with a TV playing home videos of his recently deceased daughter providing the room’s only light. When the Blind Man goes to investigate noises in his living room, Lang emphasizes the tremble in his hands and his voice when he asks “Who’s there?”
But here’s where we see one of the subtlest examples of the movie’s brilliance, as Álvarez shoots the Blind Man like a movie monster, even when we’re supposed to be sympathizing with him. The film opens in media res, with a scene of the Blind Man dragging Rocky through the empty neighborhood streets, but it’s difficult to identify the characters from a drone wide shot.
Inside the house, Álvarez makes the Blind Man more subtly menacing by using the visual language of classic slasher movies. As Money prepares to gas the bedroom with ether, a pan in one direction shows the Blind Man laying in bed, and a pan in the reverse reveals him sitting up straight, seemingly staring at the invader. Álvarez uses the same trick to equal effect moments later, when Rocky moves away from a doorway she was blocking to show the heretofore knocked out Blind Man standing there, waiting and listening.
Reversals such as these, sometimes framing the invaders as callous vandals and sometimes framing the Blind Man as an unstoppable monster, occur throughout the film, and each new layer adds depth to the characters and the plot. Don’t Breathe wraps layers around what is, at its heart, a classic grindhouse picture.
And what a nasty little heart it is. When the Blind Man drops the weakling facade and shoots Money in the face, the effect is bloody and shocking. Every time a character falls through a wall or gets bludgeoned with a hammer, Álvarez shows us the results in gooey graphic detail. Copious bodily fluids get spilled and spit throughout the movie, from the slobber seeping from a mad dog’s maw to a turkey baster filled with semen.
Yes, you read that last part right, and it shows up in the climax to a sequence that exemplifies the movie’s complex moral balancing act. Trying to escape through the cellar door, Rocky and Alex discover that the various locks on the Blind Man’s basement door protect not the insurance money he was awarded after a young teen driver killed his daughter, but the driver herself, chained and gagged.
The revelation confirms our vilification of the Blind Man and shifts our allegiances firmly to Alex and Rocky, especially since they risk their lives to set her free. But when he accidentally shoots and kills his captive in the ensuing escape, the Blind Man responds with a sorrowful howl, tenderly caressing the woman he imprisoned.
After apparently killing Alex and capturing Rocky, the Blind Man explains his moral logic: the teen took his daughter from him, and he’s making her pay him back with a child instead of money. He impregnated her and has been holding her until she delivers, after which he’ll let her go. It’s a twisted logic, to be sure, but Lang delivers his lines with such humanity and conviction that we believe that he believes the rightness of his actions — which makes him all the more frightening.
That’s especially true when he extends that logic to the now captive Rocky. Because she took away his prisoner and the baby she carried, the Blind Man believes that Rocky owes him a child. “I’m not a rapist,” he croaks as he binds her and fills a turkey baster with his semen: “I never laid a hand on her; I promised I would set her free just as soon as she gave me a child.”
The scene is unquestionably horrifying, in part for the way it invokes its grindhouse heritage, from an age of movies that regularly and carelessly included rape as a basic plot point. But while the threat of violation still lingers in the scene, Álvarez wisely diverges from his predecessors. Refusing to leer at her exposed body and instead forcing us to watch the horrified expression Levy stretches across her face, Álvarez never lets us objectify Rocky, and keeps her just as a much a three-dimensional person as she has been throughout the movie. Cutting between her face and the approaching turkey baster, its contents dripping from the tip, Álvarez also provides the over-the-top squirms and absurdity that one wants from a B-picture.
The coup de gross occurs when a still-alive Alex attacks the Blind Man before he reaches Rocky, giving her time to escape and to exact her revenge: kicking him violently and slamming the baster down his throat, causing the Blind Man to cough up his own semen.
It’s a nasty and potentially morally dubious scene that completely works, thanks to Levy and Lang’s fully committed physical performances and from Álvarez’s staging. He knows exactly how far to push the audience, making us squirm and shudder, without sacrificing the humanity of his characters.
Álvarez flaunts his directorial prowess with not only tricky scenes like these, but also with the fundamentals of horror storytelling. As soon as the burglars enter the house, Álvarez shows the layout of the house with a one-shot that floats through every room and every corner, even showing a few concealed weapons. It puts us slightly ahead of the characters by telling us that the room they rush into is another dead end and not an exit, or that they’re not running from the Blind Man but leading him toward his armory. We feel a sense of inevitable dread as the characters jump from peril to peril, and amazement when they somehow find a way out of it.
The most impressive example of Álvarez’s spatial awareness appears near the end of the movie, after Rocky has escaped the house but is trapped in a car by the Blind Man’s marauding dog. In a sequence that invokes the 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s Cujo, we watch Rocky navigate her way through and out of the cramped blue sedan under threat of the dog’s snapping jaws. In a fantastically choreographed set of shots, we watch Rocky lure the dog into the trunk, kick closed the back seat, and roll safely away.
The car sequence is Don’t Breathe in miniature, featuring a wild-eyed Jane Levy, a simultaneously sympathetic and scary attacker, and a well-defined area to navigate. That moment alone is enough of an achievement, and it’s remarkable that Álvarez expands it to a house and a street, and possibly across country, as the movie’s ominous ending suggests.
At the time of this writing, Álvarez’s planned Dante’s Inferno adaptation is still in the earliest stages of maybe/maybe not happening, and the box office disappointment of The Girl in the Spider’s Web still lingers. But he’s finished the script for Don’t Breathe 2, based on an idea that producer Sam Raimi called “the greatest idea for a sequel [he’s] ever heard.”
That might still be a long way off, but Don’t Breathe still stands as a fantastic original horror movie. Even knowing all of the twists and turns, there’s a great deal of pleasure in watching the expert way Álvarez sets up and surprises audiences.
A home invasion masterpiece? You bet.
