Missing MacGuffin In Breathe, Earth is stripped of its oxygen, the plants are dead, oceans are dried up, no one trusts anyone – but we don’t know what caused it. This one-room thriller is a lesson in not taking your scenario seriously, says
BEHIND the hard-to-open bulkhead doors of ahomemade bunker in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, live Zora (Quvenzhané Wallis) and Maya (Jennifer Hudson). If you can call it living: their every breath has to be calibrated and analysed, as the oxygen-producing machinery constructed by their missing father and husband Darius (a short, sweet performance by the rapper and actor Common) starts to fail. Earth’s oxygen has vanished. So has its plant life. The oceans are all dried up. Survivors are few, and trust a thing of the past. Had Maya simply listened to her daughter and let in the two mysterious visitors who want to study their oxygen kit (Tess, played by Milla Jovovich, and Lucas, played by Sam Worthington), Breathe’s plot would have barely filled a quarter-hour.
Zora has been monologuing to her presumably dead dad over the shortwave radio for months now. If Tess has overheard her, then her claim that she is Darius’s colleague may simply be alie. Because no one trusts anyone, everybody shouts a lot, performing a predictable dance around door codes, pass keys, key-cards, dead and dying batteries, cable ties, unreachable switches. Breathe’s highlight is Sam Worthington’s manic yet dead-eyed Lucas – incapable, after a lifetime of horrors, of thinking more than 30 seconds ahead.
Low-budget science fiction favours the global catastrophe. What better excuse could there be for squeezing your cast into small, affordable sets? Though hardly one-room dramas, two other sci-fi thrillers, made in 2018, show what can be done with relatively few resources: Bird Box, in which Sandra Bullock’s Malorie must shield her eyes and those of her children from entities prompting people to suicide, and AQuiet Place, whose gargoyle-like aliens chomp down on anything and anyone
