Don’t Breathe

A trio of way­ward twen­tysome­things plan one final rob­bery before get­ting out of the game in Fede Alvarez’s gris­ly home inva­sion thriller. Their tar­get is a seem­ing­ly easy one: a war vet­er­an who lost his sight in bat­tle (Stephen Lang). He proves any­thing but – as Mon­ey (Daniel Zovat­to) fore­warns, ​“just because he’s blind, doesn’t mean he’s a saint”. Indeed, the blind man soon reveals him­self as a slaugh­ter-hap­py psy­chopath, ready to break the rules to pro­tect a gris­ly secret. He locks the doors, board up the win­dows and turns out the lights, ini­ti­at­ing a dead­ly game of cat and mouse.

An absent moth­er and a revolv­ing door of step­fa­thers have hard­ened rag­tag Rocky (Jane Levy). As she nav­i­gates this dark labyrinth – a kind of under con­struc­tion Ami­tyville with a ludi­crous ratio of creaky doors and floor­boards – the chop­py edit­ing style and low-lit cin­e­matog­ra­phy ampli­fy the film’s unset­tling tone. Added to this, the man’s visu­al impair­ment doesn’t dimin­ish the threat he pos­es to the would-be thieves. So does Don’t Breathe unex­pect­ed­ly pro­vide a pos­i­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion of dis­abil­i­ty? Not exactly.

In fact, Alvarez employs some pret­ty insen­si­tive stereo­typ­ing. The film’s antag­o­nist creeps around on all fours, sniff­ing his vic­tims’ shoes and cov­er­ing his ears in agony to block out the slow hum of a wash­ing machine. Even the film’s tagline, ​‘he can’t see you, but he will find you’ appears to speak to his canine char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion. Blind­ness is cel­e­brat­ed here only as a prac­tised tool for the hunt, but putting that unfor­tu­nate detail to one side, this is a gen­uine­ly dis­turb­ing addi­tion to the genre.