"Don't Breathe" Review- From the Vaults

 So, "Don't Breathe" is the story of three assholes (one from "It Follows", he's the biggest asshole, the girl from "Evil Dead", she's the second biggest, and the dude from "Goosebumps", he's sensible) who decide to rob the house of a Stephen Lang and his dog.

Shenanigans ensue.

This movie is great. It's tense (to an uncomfortable degree in places, there is one particular scene which uses two windows and a dog, and another which uses a set of keys), it uses the set-up well, and it keeps things relatively simple with only one location and four principal actors (five if you count the dog, who is terrifying in this) and remains fairly grounded throughout. It even does the same thing that Evil Dead (which I liked) did in that it has one character you kind of like and want to survive undergoing an unholy amount of pain and suffering at the hands of the horrors before them.

Stephen Lang has about four lines, but is the most terrifying creation this year after Darcy and the Nazis in "Green Room", he's like a man possessed, who happens to have trapped three dickheads in the one place he knows like the back of his gigantic, meaty death-hand. His arms are like tree trunks. 

And whilst these three people (well, you can guess from the trailer that it quickly becomes two) are in his house, trying to escape with the money and their lives, from a blind death-machine and his pet dog, it remains clever and tense...

HOWEVER.

...

There is one slight issue I had which Green Room did not:

I did not want the Nazis in Green Room to win. Or at least, not at any point in the film.

Whilst it gives us a somewhat sympathetic backstory for Jane Levy (getting her sister out of the shittiest house in Detroit, which is saying a lot) as to why she is robbing this place, Daniel Zovatto is an unrepentant dick-weasel and Dylan Minnette is both the only genuinely nice dude and the one who advocates leaving the place without the money when things quickly go wrong and Stephen Lang is on the warpath, because no amount of money can save you from Stephen Lang, blind or not, (heck, Minnette is actually the heroic one in all of this, going back for people at INCREDIBLE risk to himself), the point still remains that these are three people robbing the house of a blind man. I was totally on his side too, and Minnette was talking sense all the way through about why stealing more than $10,000 would land them with hard jail time, how bringing a gun to a robbery would give Lang free legal reign to shoot them etc but, of course, there is more to this than meets the eye and Stephen Lang may or may not be a psychopath...

It's damn fine and incredibly tight, it more than lives up to the hype. Even when the big reveal happens with Stephen Lang, establishing him as somewhat less innocent than his blindness makes out, you do want all sides to just back away, and are genuinely unsure of who is going to make it. It never loses its focus either, and it keeps you on your toes.

Just do not go into this expecting to like anybody, except maybe Dylan Minnette's character, where the writing really shines.