The Big Picture

• Breathe fails to create an emotional impact, proving to be a shallow work of science fiction.
• The film's hollow narrative, paper-thin relationships, and lackluster visuals make it an entirely empty experience.
• The clunky escalations grow increasingly tiresome, dragging us to a conclusion that echoes into nothingness.

Brooklyn, New York 2039. Two masked men, a father and son, wander around an ugly orange-tinted world where we are informed via unnecessary onscreen text that oxygen is now in short supply. This is an early sign of how little director Stefon Bristol’s Breathe, a self-serious, yet superficial sci-fi movie constantly in search of something more, trusts its audience. Whereas other recent works of cinema have offered interesting reflections on the urgency of a collapsing climate, this one wallows around in the vague aftermath of it. An accident leads to a death and Darius (Common) holds his father in his arms as he dies. It’s a promising start that proceeds to get immediately undercut as the film then becomes about him setting out on a journey, all of which takes place both offscreen and months in the past, while we remain behind. It's more interesting to imagine Common wandered into the stellar sci-fi series Silo, itself about being locked away from an inhospitable world, than anything here.

Before he leaves, Darius returns home to his wife Maya (Jennifer Hudson) and daughter Zora (Quvenzhané Wallis). Some rather forced and awkward dialogue establishes the characters' relationships with each other. Then he leaves. Zora narrates all of how we got here, spelling out what we can already see with our own eyes in the orange CGI dystopia that is now New York, before staring directly into the camera after saying how they were not prepared emotionally for the future to come. She does so by speaking into a radio like her father can hear her, a tired gimmick that, like the rest of the experience, never carries the emotional impact the film is desperately reaching for. It all just continually slips through its fingers.

'Breathe' Is a Shallow Work of Science Fiction

That future Zora is discussing initially feels like it wants to be something like The Road, the underrated adaptation of the shattering Cormac McCarthy novel, though the film is never even remotely subtle or thoughtful enough to achieve this. Some of this comes down to the central relationship between Maya and Zora being painfully paper-thin, defined mostly by failed attempts at bittersweet familial comedy as they go through the daily tasks of living. When they’re hiding out inside, everything moves too quickly and without any sense of the rhythms of the characters. The only positive thing about this is that we aren’t having to observe the ugly visual style that dominates the outside world. The trouble is that they’re instead trapped in the shadow of the loss of a patriarch which writer Doug Simon uses as a blunt cudgel to create a split between the two of them. After an argument over dinner where Zora says she wants to go look for her father, Maya says in exasperation, “We cannot keep fighting like this.” So don’t? Add another dimension to the characters besides the stock characteristics of a rebellious daughter and an overbearing mother. Maybe then, when everything starts moving, we’d have actually gotten to know them beyond their archetypes.

Quite quickly, Maya and Zora run into Tess (Milla Jovovich) and Lucas (Sam Worthington), who attempt to plead for their help. They say they’re with a group of people elsewhere and that they need to talk to Darius to replicate their O2 generator. Maya doesn’t trust them and asks how she is supposed to know they won’t pull a fast one on them. With the most absurdly faux sincerity, Jovovich’s Tess says that she “Has her word.” This and some slight convincing from Zora is apparently all it takes as they then come outside to talk with them. Of course, things go awry, and a scattered battle for the refuge the family has created begins to unfold.

Watching this all play out, with paranoia and distrust taking hold, the story Breathe most feels like it is attempting to mimic is one that was already done far better in It Comes at Night. Bristol’s depiction of this hellscape is too safe in terms of its tone, never fully grappling with the dark and heavy ideas that surround its end of the world. There are even several moments where it seems like Hudson is being censored from swearing too much, with the dubbed “motherfreaking” being the most ridiculous moment in the entire movie. Worse than that, each escalation is so clunky that it is hard to take the whole thing even remotely seriously. You don’t feel any tension when it then becomes about defending the sanctuary as Tess and Lucas try to break their way in with a drill. Instead, it is painfully tiresome and strained.

'Breathe' Completely Runs Out Of Narrative Oxygen

A week ago, the worst sci-fi movie of the year thus far would have been Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver. Not to be outdone, Breathe gives that disaster of a film a run for its money. Whenever it tries to be a thriller, it’s not even remotely thrilling. Any more dramatic beat it goes for falls completely flat. The entire visual style is an eyesore that never feels right. It is small in scope in a way that could have been interesting, but that means you have to do the basics right. Each escalating development, especially one particularly obnoxious one about midway through that sends two characters out on the road for some reason, is all built on a hollow house of cards. It’s like you can see the exact moment where the film ran out of ideas, something it already had shockingly few of, and had to come up with a contrived reason to throw in more conflict before tying everything up in a bizarrely nice bow.

The cast gets left stranded in a narrative wasteland, none of them able to deliver any of the already lackluster lines with the necessary gusto to salvage them. When everything then falls apart, it has nothing to hold together. It's like an approximation of a sci-fi thriller without any of the necessary energy behind it to work. In the end, Breathe is empty bluster and nothing more. It’s like a vacuum of where a movie should be, sucking all the air out of the room until nothing is left. As it drags itself to a conclusion where you’ve long stopped caring about anything that’s happening, even its last desperate gasps echo out into utter nothingness.

Breathe is now available to stream on VOD in the U.S.

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