Highly, highly recommended.
The warm weather and the World Cup has probably altered your TV viewing habits – we don’t blame you for that – but on the off chance that you’re looking for a very decent film to watch after the football is over, Netflix have just added one of the best home invasion thriller-horrors in years.
Released in 2016, we were massive fans of Fede Alvarez’s thriller Don’t Breathe. In the most simplistic terms it’s about a trio of friends break into the house of a wealthy blind man, thinking they’ll get away with the perfect heist. They’re wrong.
While home-invasion horrors are one of the most popular sub-genres around – Eden Lake, Hush, You’re Next are just a few ‘relatively recent’ examples – Don’t Breathe really stands apart because the tension is so palpable that you’ll be chewing your finger nails.
The Guardian have hailed it as a “master class in tension” while Empire praised it for being an “intense, streamlined exercise in gruesome thrills”. The Philadelphia Inquirer hailed it as “One of the most suspenseful, terrifying, and devilishly original horror pics in recent memory.
It’s claustrophobic as hell and the suspense is genuinely racked up to such a point that you’ll be watching through your hands. Just like he did in Avatar, Stephen Lang steals the whole show as the army veteran that you really shouldn’t f**k with!
Imagine an incredibly sinister version of Home Alone mixed with Saw. Oh yeah, the final act is eerily reminiscent of that superb ‘night vision’ chase that kept audience on tender-hooks at the end of Silence of the Lambs.
With a Metacritic rating of 71% and 88% on the more populist Rotten Tomatoes, it’s clear that the critics absolutely loved Don’t Breathe and audiences did too.
Its box-office success was absolutely gargantuan – it made $157,100,845 on a budget of $9.9 million – and it’s easy to see why because it’s an incredibly enjoyable watch.
Don’t Breathe is now available to watch on Netflix.
