One of 2016’s bigger hits was the suspense/horror movie Don’t Breathe.  Here’s one of the movie’s trailers…

The movie’s plot is, essentially, a thematic inversion of the 1967 Audrey Hepburn/Alan Arkin film Wait Until Dark.  Here’s the trailer for that film…

In Wait Until Dark, a trio of thieves enter Audrey Hepburn’s character’s home and, eventually, terrorize her as they seek heroine they are certain is hidden within the place.

In Don’t Breathe Rocky (Jane Levy), her sleazy boyfriend “Money” (Daniel Zovatto), and the clean cut/not-so-secretly-pining-for-Rocky Alex (Dylan Minnette) form the trio of thieves who use information Alex gets from his father’s security company to break into homes, disarm their alarms, and steal whatever items they can get their hands on.

It turns out Rocky has a very good reason for engaging in these activities: She lives in a highly dysfunctional home with her very sleazy mother and much younger sister.  She hopes to get enough money to be able to flee this hellish house with her young sister.

So while her methods are bad, her goal is noble.

When the trio hear about a man, as it turns out a Blind Man (Stephen Lang, absolutely terrific here), who may have as much as $300,000 hidden away in his home in a deserted slum within Detroit, they figure they’ve found the right mark and haul that can finally get them out of their individual bad situations.

Unlike Audrey Hepburn’s character in Wait Until Dark, however, Stephen Lang’s Blind Man turns out to be far from helpless…or, for that matter, good.  There be terrible secrets hiding within his house and our “heroes”, or perhaps more appropriately “anti-heroes”, are about to enter a very dark (no pun intended) world from which they may not escape from…alive.

Don’t Breathe was made by the same team, and features the same star, Jane Levy, of 2013’s Evil Dead remake, a film that, frankly, I didn’t much like (you can read my review of that film here).  Unlike the bloody and gore filled Evil Dead, Don’t Breathe uses very little actual blood and almost no gore in telling its story.  Instead, this movie relies on building tension through the strength of the actors and situations they are in to convey the terror of their situation.  While I’m not adverse to gore in films (I loved the original Evil Dead films and the first two were filled with gore!), this movie benefits tremendously from the decision to forego the bloody stuff and focus on situational tension.

Before I go, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that those who faulted the film felt its second act and the big reveal regarding what the Blind Man was up to in his decrepit house was a little too much.  Frankly, I can’t argue against those who felt these things were unnecessary.  Indeed, these elements could have been cut out and the film and we therefore might have had a leaner and meaner feature.  However, these revelations didn’t bother me as much as it did some others.

In the end, Don’t Breathe is an easy recommendation to all fans of good tension/horror films.