Spoiler Warning! This post contains spoilers for the movie trailer posted to the left of this very sentence!
To the left you’ll find the trailer for Don’t Breathe, a movie about three no-goodniks who break into a blind guy’s house to steal his money so that they can move out of town and pursue lives of prosperity and happiness.
Unfortunately, this blind guy is a super-capable, curmudgeonly bad ass and doesn’t take kindly to strangers trying to take advantage of him. He traps them in his house, turns out the lights, and hunts them down.
I rather like the trailer and I’m interested in seeing the movie. Of course, if you look at my DVD collection you’ll see an entire shelf stuffed with Zatoichi movies so I’m an absolute mark for the “blind bad ass” genre.
However, I do have one light critique for this trailer.
Around about the halfway mark it’s revealed that the aforementioned no-goodniks are not the only ones trapped in the house as they stumble across a woman chained up somewhere in the bowels of the blind man’s house. This raises all sorts of interesting questions!
Who is she? How long has she been there? Are there others? Is the she simply the last no-goodnik that thought a blind guy would be an easy target? Is he just lashing out at those invading his home or is he something more sinister?
So much good stuff! It’s a great reveal and I really would have preferred the studio saved that beat for the movie. I understand it’s trying to get butts in seats but I feel this trailer is strong enough without it. Oh well.
On the bright side, I really like how the movie visually portrays pitch-black darkness.
Some movies will simply use low light and have the actors pantomime stumbling around, pretending they can’t see anything. This works but sometimes it’s not immediately clear that it’s supposed to be pitch black. Other movies will simply turn off the picture. Effective but a lot of times it’s frustrating for the audience because they can’t see anything either.
Don’t Breathe shoots these scenes like the camera has a night vision filter on it. The audience can see what’s going on and it’s visually clear that it’s pitch black and the characters can’t see anything. I especially love the close ups that show the actors with wildly dilated eyes. Very effective and very cool!
Don’t Breathe hits theaters on August 26th and I’m looking forward to checking it out.
Source: Entertainment Weekly
