Don't Breathe 2

A Breath
Of Redemption

Don't Breathe 2
USA/Serbia 2021
Directed by Rodo Sayagues
Sony Pictures

Warning: Slight spoilers about the structure
of the story and a few minor reveals.

Well this is a bit of a surprise. Contrary to my expectations, I quite liked the fraught, tension filled movie Don’t Breathe (reviewed here) a few years ago but didn’t think much of any of the main protagonists, nor the villanous antagonist of the Blind Man (played so well by Stephen Lang). However, the morality of the characters aside, I had a very intense time at the cinema with it but didn’t see that it was worth going down the sequel route, even though the ending to the last one was deliberately left loose for a sequel thread to be pulled if necessary.

Then I saw the trailer for Don’t Breathe 2 and I absolutely bought in on the idea. The writers and director of the original film have really tried to take things in a different direction here. I mean, sure the theme of home invasion meets lethal force of resistance is still the main meat and vegetables of the film but, they’ve managed to turn the nasty, villanous Blind Man here into the main, almost heroic protagonist and have given him a real shot at redemption (of a sort).

The film starts off with a little girl surviving a fire. Eight years later she’s been ‘adopted’ by the Blind Man, who keeps her mostly safe and tries to teach her survival techniques. However, she attracts the attention of someone who may or may not have ties to her traumatic past and, as the audience is clued in from an early TV news broadcast, the intentions of these people probably don’t have her best interests at heart. So they storm the new home of the Blind Man to get her back... which is usually a big mistake, right?

Okay, so there’s a little bit of the 'same old same old' during the first half of the movie but, although the Blind Man is as lethal as those sent to both kill him and abduct the girl for their own nefarious purposes, he’s by no means invincible like, say, one of his nearest cinematic counterparts, Zatoichi (kind of)... he’s seen getting hurt a lot and he doesn’t always make the right decisions when it comes to a firefight nor, indeed, with his upbringing of the girl herself (played very nicely by Madelyn Grace).

The film is rendered in very desaturated colours (plus a lot of the old clichéd orange and teal lighting) but it all looks really good and there are some outstanding sequences and ideas which play well in the movie... such as another homage to the cracking glass scene in Spielberg’s The Lost World - Jurassic Park 2, this time over a blazing inferno of a greenhouse. Another nice thing is when an early character who is set up and immediately has the audience's sympathy, is killed off fairly quickly so you are sure the villains are pretty evil. Also, they kill a dog so, yeah, they’re bad! One amazing moment of thought out peril in the vein of the old ‘tying the lady to the railroad tracks’ school of filmmaking involves an electric wheelchair and a handcuffed girl, slowly rolling its way towards a precipice. It’s all good stuff and coupled with Roque Banos’ wonderful score (sadly not on CD so far), it all works really well.

One of the nice things about the film is, although the nature of the last act plays out in a similar fashion to the first... it’s still people bashing each other up in an enclosed, dark area but in a much larger space... it’s different from both the first movie and the first part of this one in that, it’s no longer set on the Blind Man’s home turf. His homebase, so to speak, is destroyed by fire as both he and an obvious way to track the bad guys are left for dead in the fiery aftermath of the their swathe of destruction. So, in the last third of the movie, he tracks them by... well, it’s another cliché but a welcome one... and brings the fight home to them in their own space. Coming in like some kind of blind, savage deux ex machina just as the girl is about to fall foul of the criminal’s, almost but really not quite, sympathetic intentions.

The film does, indeed, bring some self realisation and redemption in terms of the Blind Man. They don’t pull the rug again like in the previous film... but his fate is, well it may or may not be certain. This one is all about the final freeing of the girl to go on to lead a life that she can make for herself but... there might be room for more. All I’m saying on that is, if you stay in your seat once the first part of the end credits play out, you will be treated to a predictable but nonetheless welcome little sequence which is deliberately ambiguous but, obviously only ambiguous in so much as if this one makes a tonne of money, you could see room for a possible sequel. 

So that’s my final word on Don’t Breathe 2. A taut little action piece with an unlikely pair of protagonists and a similarly ‘shades of grey’ set of antagonists. If you liked the first movie then this is a nice follow up and a good effort at doing the constant sequel juggling act of staying the same but also doing something different.
 

Regression

Gone With The Mind

Regression
2015 Spain/Canada/USA
Directed by Alejandro Amenábar
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah, spoilers all over this review. 

I wanted to see this movie because I trust the lead actor, Ethan Hawke, to make interesting choices when it comes down to films to star in and the premise of this one looked kinda interesting. I eventually ended up in the Empire cinema in Leicester Square but, it turns out, in the smallest screen possible. For the outrageous price of a tenner, I was watching the movie in a screen which only contained 23 seats, divided unevenly between three rows. I guess the manager made the right choice of screen size for this film though because, despite the fact that there really shouldn’t be any screens this size outside of someone’s living room (you definitely shouldn’t be charging more than 50p for the privilege in that kind of tight squeeze environment), I was the only person in that screen watching the film on a Saturday afternoon. I’m guessing Regression won’t be breaking box office records anytime soon.

I’ve only seen one other movie by Alejandro Amenábar and that was The Others... which disappointed me big time when it was released into cinemas because it had a so-called twist ending which I'd found pretty obvious. The one thing I took away from the experience was that the director had composed his own score, which wasn’t a bad one. Other than that, despite some good performances and atmospheres, that film left me kinda cold.

However, because of this experience, I was primed for Regression to have some kind of twist ending and so, as I watched the story unfold, my mind was turning to find out what was going on but... as the film progressed to the end of its running time, I began to realise that, not only wasn’t there any kind of twist to the film, there really wasn’t even anything actually happening at all. So if you don’t want the ending of this film spoiled... don’t read the next couple of paragraphs.

This film is purported to be based on real life events which, having watched it now, I can fully believe... given the lack of anything actually occurring. It also claims to be about a devil worshipping cult which is turning families against themselves and causing, in this particular case, a man to abuse his daughter, played by Emma Watson. It’s up to the main police detective protagonist Ethan Hawke to protect the girl and get to the bottom of the truth of the devil worshipping cult versus a case of child abuse... aided by the equally watchable David Thewlis as a psychiatrist who specialises in hypnotic regression, whom Hawke calls in to help with the investigation. All three of these, plus their supporting cast, are turning in nicely sound performances but, I felt, both the story and the shot design lets them down big time.

The truth is... not only is there no devil worshipping cult... there’s no actual crime either. It’s all just hysteria created by outside influences on the mind and, as possibly hinted, false memories created by the hypnotic regression sessions intended to find the truth. So, despite the fact that there are some reasonable attempts at scary sequences where Hawke believes he is possibly being drugged and forced to take part in demonic rituals involving the slaughter and consumption of babies... it’s actually him just having nightmares and there’s really nothing much going on. So I guess, in some way, there is actually a twist ending to the movie... in that there’s just “nothing to see here... move along”.

To be fair, the actors do their best to capture the tensions and signs of hysteria that they are all thinking themselves into and you could say that there’s a parallel somewhere in this movie for the ‘Salem Witch Trials... or at least the version of them popularised by Arthur Miller in his play The Crucible. It just feels like by the end of the movie, metaphorically, everybody’s been dying to see what’s in an attractively decorated paper bag and, when someone opens it, they find the bag is completely empty, which explains why the bag is light enough to be able to fly around from one direction to another as any particular breeze takes it... there’s just not enough weight in it to keep it anchored. And in that analogy... the bag is the storyline. Which is a shame because, when you get a group of actors such as these, it almost feels like its a waste of their time to have participated in this one. Not a popular thing to say, to be sure, but this movie did leave me disappointed and less than entertained.

The editing combined with the camera work seemed a little less than remarkable too. There were some tracking shots and examples of moving camera but I did notice that this film did seem to be more comprised of static (or almost static) camera set ups which would play out for a few seconds before cutting to another shot and then returning to roughly the same angle as the first... but at a slightly different zoom or distance from the camera. There wasn’t as much use of master shots and moving the camera through them as I would have expected, to be honest, and the way in which various scenes were treated was obviously enough for my conscious mind to take note... the dullness of the shooting style did bring me out of the movie a bit, I think.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Regression. It’s a film which seems to be mostly about performance in terms of having anything good going for it. The score by Roque Banos is okay and appropriate to the images but it didn’t strike me in the same special way that this composer’s Herrmannesque scores for The Machinist or The Oxford Murders (reviewed here) did, to be honest. It might be that it stands up better away from the film but I need to hear some album samples from this one, I think, before I’ll commit to a purchase. All in all, though, it’s not a film I’d recommend to any of my friends and certainly not one I’d bother to repeat watch anytime soon. If you want to go see a twisty turny horror film then I’d advise against this one because it just goes nowhere, ultimately and, even the journey to the ending, which is often as important, is less than interesting. Hardcore fans of the actors and actresses involved in this film may get something out of it but, honestly, it’s nothing special.