Don't breathe review: a visceral and heart-pounding contemporary thriller

It's a simple plot - even the dialogue is sparse. Three friends - Alex (Dylan Minnette), Money (Daniel Zovatto), and Rocky (Jane Levy) - successfully run a series of small-time break-ins using house codes taken from Alex's father's security company. They're quick, clean, in-and-out jobs where the targets are upper middle class.

Basically, everything short of grand larceny so that they can't get into serious trouble if they're caught.

Each of the three have reasons to get out of Detroit. The plan is to head to California, but for that they need money - hard cash.

So when Money gets a tip off about a grieving father who won a massive settlement payout from his daughter's fatal car accident, they decide to risk it all to achieve their Californian dream.

The job looks easy - the man of the house (Avatar's Stephen Lang, more terrifying than ever) is blind.

But his houseguests have no idea what they're up against.

A tense throw down

The movie works well because of how it plays up silences. Every creak of a floorboard ends up doing much more than an obvious jump scare would.

The cinematography too is beautifully clean, especially when you compare to how most modern horror movies rely on shaky, choppily edited filming to produce scares.

So even though it may be only 88 minutes long, the tension makes it feel a lot longer.

The biggest draw is Stephen Lang's blind man act - he's almost Terminator-like in his movements and far more formidable than the three 20-somethings could have ever assumed. He manages the killer feat of making his character utterly disturbing and terrifying while being sadly sympathetic too. In fact, his attitude towards the world/the robbers/anything that crosses his path can be summed up in a line uttered by him: "There is nothing to hold a man back once he realises there is no god."

There isn't much to complain about when it comes to the actors - Minnette, who we last saw playing a similar character in the pathetic Goosebumps movie, manages to make Alex likable to the point that we hope he survives.

And Levy, who teamed up with Alvarez for Evil Dead before, manages to play the tortured heroine who can kick ass and get moving when needed with ease.

The verdict

Your nerves will be ridiculously frayed by the end of this terrifying movie experience. But since that's the very goal of any horror/thriller movie, you'll walk away satisfied, reminding yourself that it's okay to breathe again.

RATING: 4 out of 5

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