Don’t Breathe (2016)

Don’t Breathe is a 2016 horror thriller by Fede Álvarez about three young thieves trapped and hunted inside a blind veteran’s house.

At a Glance

Overview

Rocky, Alex and Money are three young Detroit burglars who break into houses and sell what they steal through a fence who keeps underpaying them. Rocky wants out. She dreams of moving to California with her little sister, Diddy, away from their abusive mother. Then Money gets a tip: a Gulf War veteran living alone in an abandoned Detroit neighborhood is said to keep $300,000 in cash at home, a settlement paid after a wealthy young woman killed his daughter in a car accident. Better still, the man is blind.

The three drug his rottweiler and break in at night. Within minutes, the plan falls apart. The blind man, Norman Nordstrom, is far stronger, faster and more dangerous than they imagined, and he knows every inch of his house. Once he realizes there are intruders, he locks the doors and begins hunting them in total silence. The thieves must creep, hold their breath and avoid every creaking floorboard, in darkness as suffocating as The Descent. Álvarez called the film an “exercise in reversal”: a nice house on a scary street, and a home-invasion story told from the invaders’ side. As the night goes on, they discover that the house hides something far worse than money in the basement.

Production

Álvarez made Don’t Breathe partly as a response to criticism of his debut feature, Evil Dead (2013), which also starred Jane Levy. He wanted an original story with less blood, more suspense and nothing supernatural, which he felt had become too trendy. The project was first announced in 2014 under the title A Man in the Dark. Making the villain blind came from the idea of taking abilities away from the antagonist rather than adding powers. Daniel Zovatto, Dylan Minnette, Jane Levy and Stephen Lang joined the cast in mid-2015. Principal photography began on June 29, 2015. Although the story is set in Detroit, the film was mainly shot in Hungary, with only a few views filmed in Detroit itself. Álvarez estimated it cost about half as much as Evil Dead. Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures co-produced, and Roque Baños composed the score.

Cast

• Jane Levy as Rocky

• Dylan Minnette as Alex

• Daniel Zovatto as Money

• Stephen Lang as The Blind Man (Norman Nordstrom)

• Franciska Törőcsik as Cindy Roberts

• Emma Bercovici as Diddy

Reception

Don’t Breathe opened at number one in North America with $26.4 million, knocking Suicide Squad off the top spot and becoming the year’s biggest original horror opening. It went on to gross about $157 million worldwide against a $9.9 million budget. Rotten Tomatoes reports 88 percent approval from 244 reviews, calling it “a satisfyingly tense, chilling addition to the home invasion genre,” and Metacritic’s score is 71 out of 100. CinemaScore audiences gave it a B plus. Variety called it “a muscular exercise in brutal, relentless peril,” and The Verge saw it as a clever flip of Wait Until Dark (1967), though Álvarez said he wrote the script before seeing that film. A sequel, Don’t Breathe 2, was released in August 2021.

Spoiler: The Ending

Norman kills Money. Rocky and Alex escape into the basement, where they find Cindy Roberts, the woman who killed Norman’s daughter, chained and pregnant. As they try to free her, Norman fires blindly and kills her. Later Norman captures Rocky and reveals that Cindy was carrying a “replacement” for his daughter. He prepares to inseminate Rocky by force, but Alex, who survived by tricking Norman, frees her. Norman then shoots Alex dead at the front door. Rocky traps the dog in a car trunk, disorients Norman by setting off his alarm system, beats him with a crowbar and pushes him into the basement, where his gun fires into his side. She escapes with the money. Days later at a train station, Rocky and Diddy watch a news report: Norman survived and says he killed two intruders in self-defense, never mentioning Rocky, Cindy or the money.

Trivia and Facts

• The project’s original title was A Man in the Dark.

• Jane Levy also starred in Álvarez’s Evil Dead (2013).

• The Detroit-set story was filmed mostly in Hungary.

• Its opening Saturday dropped just 1.5 percent from Friday, unusual

for an R-rated horror film.

• Ghost House Pictures, Sam Raimi’s horror company, co-produced it.

• Producer Sam Raimi called the sequel concept “the greatest idea for

a sequel I’ve ever heard.”