‘Don’t Breathe 2’ Trailer Released, Hits Theaters in August 2021
Horror veterans Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues are back with a sequel to their 2016 sleeper hit Don’t Breathe, whose new trailer hit the internet. Veteran character actor Stephen Lang returns as a superhuman blind guy who wreaks bloody havoc on a group of criminals who just so happened to burglarize the wrong house. While Alvarez directed the first movie, he worked only on the script this time, with his long-time writing partner Sayagues making his directorial debut and with long-time producing partner Sam Raimi again helping to produce the movie.
The first film focused on a group of young delinquents in a run down section of Detroit, who burglarize vacant houses in order to make enough money to leave the city. These kids end up making a fatal choice when they break into the home of Norman Nordstrom (Lang) a blind man with superhuman combat abilities who kidnaps women and impregnates them with a turkey baster of his genetic material, in order to recreate the family he lost in a drunk driving accident. It was a tense, creepy, and unconventional take on what is essentially a monster movie, with Lang giving a committed performance as Nordstrom. The big twist with this sequel however, is a shift in perspective. This time Lang is the hero, who must fight to save a new surrogate family he has made amongst a few friends in his community from violent criminals who seem to want to kidnap them.
This is an interesting, if strange, twist, as Nordstrom’s actions were particularly heinous in the first film, especially regarding his imprisonment and forced breeding of young women. For those who remember the first one, it will take a lot of work for the movie to make him a sympathetic hero, or at least someone to root for in a lesser of two evils situation, but I am intrigued to see if the filmmakers can make it work.
The trailer looks very stylish and does a good job of setting up the movie, however for something seemingly so intimate in scale, it gives away a lot of the kills and climactic moments in order to make Nordstrom look like a badass. It also focuses so much on the violence that it makes Don’t Breathe 2 almost seem like an action thriller, like John Wick with jump scares, mores than a proper horror movie like the first. While it looks like there will be some cool moments and creative kills that allow Nordstom’s blindness and superhuman hearing to give him an advantage over his adversaries, I worry that the trailer may have given too much away. Hopefully the trailer left enough out or is deliberately misleading enough so that there are still a good amount of surprises when audiences go to see the actual movie when it comes out this year.
Don’t Breathe 2 is slated to be released August 13, 2021, and given the surprise success of the first, is looking to cement itself as a worthy companion to the original, armed with a bigger budget and a fresh twist on its clever premise. I’ve saved the trailer for the end with this warning: it looks like it gives away a lot of the final movie, so watch it with caution.
