Don't Breathe

September has arrived and this notoriously slow month at the movies often spells instant death for new releases. It certainly meant on a dead-on-arrival start for The Light Between Oceans and it spelled total disaster for Morgan, which debuted at number 17 on the box office charts despite being released into more than 2,000 theaters. But this week isn’t all doom and gloom! This slow week gave some much-needed breathing room to a few August releases while allowing Don’t Breathe to have a strong second weekend at the box office.

In a summer filled with misfires and box office disappointments, the horror genre has kept its head above the water. The Conjuring 2 crossed the $100 million mark. Lights Out was a gigantic sleeper hit. And now, Don’t Breathe has closed out August with a surprising bang, dethroning Suicide Squad with a very strong opening weekend.

What if Rutger Hauer’s relatively absurd, visually-impaired martial arts badass from Blind Fury was besieged by a home invasion in his reclusive Early Bird Special years? The answer is — to an extent — Don’t Breathe, a thriller that skews a little more toward The Collector than David Fincher’s underrated Panic Room. The latest effort from director Fede Alvarez (the Evil Dead remake) is a relentlessly intense cat-and-mouse game with a couple of hard lefts thrown into its twisted domestic labyrinth. It’s a nasty little piece of work that needs to be a bit more lean and slightly less mean.

Three years after delivering his visceral remake of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, director Fede Alvarez returns with Don’t Breathe, an inventive new thriller that puts a nasty spin on the home invasion genre. Alvarez’s latest follows three amateur criminals that get way more than they bargained for when they target the home of a reclusive blind man, played by the intimidating Stephen Lang. I had a chance to speak with Alvarez before a recent screening in Austin, Texas, where he discussed the making of his new film, Lang’s crucial role, and whether he thinks movie trailers are too revealing.

Ah yes, the red band trailer. When you absolutely, positively have to hear all the F-bombs a film can offer, the red band trailer is for you. And the latest preview for Don’t Breathe sure does love those F-bombs, but at least it’s found a somewhat clever way to incorporate them. if nothing else, the new trailer for the latest film from Evil Dead remake director Fede Alvarez is determined to let you know that things are about to get “really f—ed up.”

When it premiered at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival, ScreenCrush’s Britt Hayes called Don’t Breathe “an intense, relentless and confident thriller.” Giving the movie a very solid 7/10 rating, she also called it a “relentlessly intense cat-and-mouse game with a couple of hard lefts thrown into its twisted domestic labyrinth.” All that from Fede Alvarez, the guy who made the relentlessly intense Evil Dead remake. Sold!