Don't Breathe (2016)

Three teenagers learn of a blind old man, in a nearly abandoned slum in Detroit, who has just recently been awarded $300.000 in a wrongful death of his daughter. He is said to keep this money in a safe in his house, which the trio see as an easy target. They stakeout the house, the creepiest house I"ve seen since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and break into it that night.

Brilliantly effective music score accompanies the terrifying Antebellum-looking house, mimicking the pounding heartbeat in one's ears during a frightening situation as that, and the situation quickly goes from bad to terrifying, as the blind old man fights back, quite viciously, even more ferociously than his guard dog.

Every character, even the aforementioned dog, has moments of sympathy and compassion, as well as moments of contempt and disdain. We alternately feel empathy and scorn, as the lines between hero and villain, antihero and anti-villain become progressively blurred. Not an easy feat to achieve.

Several times, we, the audience, and the characters themselves, hope to have found a way out, a potential escape, only to find we are now in an even worse situation than the previous scene.

Interesting, exceptional cinematography, with some long, wide angle shot, and some interesting uses of focus, the film never sinks to using shaky cam, or high contrast/ colour saturation.

The film does begin to go off the rails in the final scenes, and ultimately goes on one scene too long (film should have ended as Rocky is running from the house, and the police are finally arriving) but this is still a first class, top tier horror/ thriller, and it, along with this year's earlier Green Room, gives me renewed hope for the horror genre. I am genuinely thrilled by new horror films using an actual, physical villain, rather than more ghost stories and demonic possessions, which I am thoroughly, incredibly bored with.

This is the 48th new release film I've seen in a cinema in 2016, and it is the first 10/ 10 I've given thus far in 2016.