Don't Breathe

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. (04/10/2016)

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. (06/09/2016)

Alvarez is a master. In Don’t Breathe he delivers a similarly intensive and energetic horror story as in his recent remake of Evil Dead, but with a more focused and, in many aspects, more surprising tale, based on a simple premise that is exploited to the maximum effect. In other words, satisfaction in every aspect. My only quibble is all those “endings”, where it seems that it’s “done”, but it turns out it isn’t due to bad decisions. Regarding the small time criminals from Detroit, nobody would expect them to behave rationally in a crisis situation, so OK. Don’t Breathe, however, stands out formally and with the performances. Stephen Lang as a blind war veteran is one of the best horror villains in recent years and Jane Levy is a candidate for the modern Scream Queen – the poor thing has gone through a lot in both Alvarez’s films :D... The camera, the sound, the dirty atmosphere. GREAT! Thanks to its sober run, the film is the antithesis of boredom and it’s also impossible to take the opposite critical position, that it’s too harsh and nasty. It is what horror should be. Certainly one of the highlights of the year. (02/09/2016)

This is an intense rush that has such strong tension that I would have guessed that the film was from the old continent. However, Sam Raimi has sniffed out a distinctive talent on the other side of the ocean who wields a clear vision and rarely agrees to compromise, perhaps by trimming believability in favor of plot development. Yet Lang's tragic protagonist and the atmosphere that cuts under your skin reign supreme, not to mention the few minutes in "absolute darkness." 4 ½. (17/10/2016)

A great genre exercise that excels at exactly what the given jewelry box needs, namely that for all the little ideas, suspenseful scenes, unexpected reversals, and overall intensity, you completely fail to perceive more than one logical barrier. Detroit is also starting to become my favorite horror destination after It Follows or Only Lovers Left Alive. Empty houses, empty streets, empty people, and the feeling that if you get lost you'll never be found again, all set against the backdrop of the hardscrabble fresh socio-economic history of the whole place. Suck it Blumhouse, this is how it's supposed to be. (26/12/2016)