Don't Wake Baddie: DON'T BREATHE

In other years I’d call Don’t Breathe the most efficient thriller in recent memory. But coming on the heels of The Shallows, and Green Room, and 10 Cloverfield Lane it’s just another in a string of suspenseful genre outings that whittle their compelling concepts down to the bare minimum. Like those other films, Don’t Breathe spends almost no time at all on its setup, putting the plot in motion quickly, trapping its instantly-characterized protagonists in the cold, merciless clutches of its tension. We meet three thieves breaking and entering to makes ends meet and save up to move out of state, their sad Detroit neighborhoods their reality while the idea of sunnier California coastline is their dream. They learn about a house in an abandoned part of town where a blind man sits on a pile of cash. It’s irresistible, but when they go to take it, the robbery goes very wrong very fast. It’s a one-thing-after-another movie locked in a one-location nightmare, the walls closing in on our leads as the story springs its twisted surprises.

Writer-director Fede Alvarez, whose 2013 semi-remake Evil Dead was a skilled crescendo of intensity and gore, conducts the proceedings as an exercise in craftsmanship. The leads are sneaking into the house of a man who can’t see, and a great deal of the tension in the early going comes from their silence. Every creaky floorboard or muffled gasp is worth a wince as the filmmakers hold the sound design in creepy near-silence, goosed with stings of music and effective jump scares. (The sensation should be familiar to anyone who remembers the board game Don’t Wake Daddy.) But then their target wakes up, adding the eerie sensation of his presence. They can stand in front of him unseen, dodging out of the way as he barrels down a hallway. Or he aims a gun while they try desperately not to give away their positions before—BANG! — a ringing cell phone on the other side of the room is met with a sudden shot. It’s good stuff, Alvarez confidently and capably moving a smooth camera across the well-defined interior spaces with a sneaky sense of heavy quiet. It’s as if even one wrong camera move would alert the man to the others’ presence.

A mirror image of the 1967 blind-Audrey-Hepburn-menaced-by-burglars movie Wait Until Dark, Don’t Breathe somehow keeps the rooting interest in the people doing the menacing. The cast – a sad young woman (Jane Levy, so brilliantly multifaceted in Alvarez’s Evil Dead), her gruff boyfriend (Daniel Zovatto, It Follows), and an almost-innocent inside boy (Dylan Minnette, Goosebumps) – are all veterans of recent scary movies able to play a believable sense of mounting frustration and fear. The burglars are doing a bad thing, but it’s not hard to sympathize with their plight. Their target (Stephen Lang, intense as usual) is a blind man, a veteran, and, we learn, a grieving father. It’s hard not to feel some twinge of guilt over the movie’s setup. But he’s also living in a scarily locked-down house, with padlocks and bolts, bars on windows, hidden firearms, and a wall of saws, bolt cutters, and power tools. What’s he up to? And why, once he wakes up and hears the intruders in his house, does he lock them in and prepare to take them out violently instead of calling the cops? What is he trying to hide?

So it turns into a claustrophobic little chess match, with filmmaking that’s gripping and accomplished, if entirely disposable and less interesting the more surprises it unveils. The movie is too fast and lean to really grapple with its character’s personalities, instead choosing a narrow focus on their behaviors. Best is Levy, a great horror heroine on a moral sliding scale that allows her to do bad for the right reasons, while Lang brings more than what’s on the page to a man who may be a target but becomes more of a monster the more we see him do. As is so often the case the movie is better and more compelling when it’s all mysteries, suspense, and how-do-they-get-out-of-this-one? and less interesting the more literal its stakes and clear its motivations. Alvarez saves some sick shocks for the end – not so much the prodigious blood and gore kind, instead relying on truly messed up mental gymnastics of its villain’s plot – but the real fun is how sharply choreographed the simple premise is in its ruthless execution.

Look Behind You! IT FOLLOWS

It Follows is a Skinner box for horror nostalgists of a certain vintage. It provokes an unconscious reaction in the genre pleasure centers of those of us pining for vintage John Carpenter craftsmanship, with a healthy respect for old school Val Lewton chills. Its set-up finds the margins of suburbia infected with paranormal stalking a la 80’s shockers. Its pay-off borrows from Cat People’s famous pool scene. This is like a handful of recent horror efforts that gather up strong dread with throwback appeal, eschewing modern shocks and CGI for something simpler and more elemental. Look at James Wan’s The Conjuring, Adam Wingard’s The Guest, and Ti West’s The Innkeepers for other recent movies that wouldn’t have been out of place on Blockbuster’s shelves with the (superior) likes of Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street.

Like those, there’s video-store classicism in writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s approach to It Follows, an art-house meets midnight movie genre effort. He brings a resourceful simplicity to the tension and concept. He makes frames full of ominous negative space, implying danger in even normal moments. He pins his characters unsteadily off-center in the shots, Rich Vreeland’s driving synth-soaked score adding to the unease. Long steady widescreen compositions from cinematographer Mike Gioulakis looking down ordinary sunny suburban streets allow the suspense to take its sweet time inevitably dredging up dread. As it unspooled, I could almost see a retro pulpy tagline: You can run, but you can’t hide, because…IT FOLLOWS.

But what is the “it” in question? It’s unclear, remaining vaguely defined throughout, but it is certainly plenty menacing anyway. Maika Monroe, who appears haunted even before she gets cursed, plays a teen who hooks up with her sketchy new boyfriend (Jake Weary). He promptly disappears, but not before holding her captive and telling her he’s cursed with something deadly. “I passed it to you,” he warns. “It” is a deadly paranormal stalker, able to take the form of anyone. Maybe it’s that old lady striding across the quad. Or is it the creepy kid next door? Or perhaps it’s the tall, dead-eyed man slowly moving down a dark hallway? The “It” is only visible to those with the curse, a ghostly presence at once familiar and fearful, walking forward unshakably. You can run, but it’ll find you, and it’ll kill you.

There’s some close association with Mitchell’s first film, 2011’s tender drama The Myth of the American Sleepover, which followed a group of teens in suburban Detroit as they fumbled through adolescent concerns over the course of one night. It Follows takes place in the same neighborhoods, amongst its lead’s tight group of friends (Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe, Keir Gilchrist) and the boy next door (Daniel Zovatto), as they struggle to help her. They see only her trauma, as she nervously looks around, cringing with the fear of the mysterious something stalking her. They don’t quite believe her, but are willing to help her. It’s a standard horror perspective, a group of young people slowly dragged into paranoid fears. Mitchell pays close attention to the worrying mood enveloping them, drawing suspense out of quotidian hangouts by the ways concern shifts their interactions.

Artfully slow and deliberately (perhaps frustratingly) unresolved, this is a horror picture refusing to be pinned down. The mutable, unknowable nature of the curse –a sort of supernatural STD – has an anesthetized inevitability. Like a slow-motion Freudian Final Destination, It follows a set of rules, passing danger down the line. You can put It off your trail by passing It on, but once It kills the next victim, It’ll return for you. There are a couple great scares involving a figure in the far background of a shot slowly creeping closer to our vulnerable victims in the foreground. Effective modulation of tone brings sudden apparitions just when you think it’s safe. Creepiness is maximized by the unresolved loose ends, mingling unfortunate retrograde slasher-style sex fears with the haunting feeling of regret over a mistake. It can’t be undone. It will follow forever.