The one where three teenage burglars (Suburgatory’s Jane Levy among them) decide to break into a blind man’s (“Avatar” villain and professional badass Stephen Lang) house. And if robbing a blind man sounds bad on paper, just wait until you see the secrets this particular blind man is hiding…
What Works: First-time film director Fede Alvarez must have “breathed”—hyuk yuk yuk—a huge sigh of relief when Lang signed on to play his “villain” (secret hero) because he is amazing in this part. I’m not kidding when I say he should seriously be considered for Best Supporting Actor—yep, even for a horror movie and yes, even for a performance that is near-wordless for the first two-thirds of the movie.
I cannot remember the last time I saw a horror film where we empathize with the “villain” as much as the heroes, and it adds an interesting layer of moral vertigo to the proceedings: whereas most horror films just ask “what will happen?” here we’re not sure exactly what we want to happen. Lang is as wounded as he is scary, and the closest performance comparison I can recall is Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster.
What Doesn’t: The first 15 or so minutes of the movie set pre-burglary are a great time to get us to care about the central trio of burglars. And maybe some viewers will, but one is portrayed as an outright jerk, and the two more sympathetic leads are a guy who’s screwing over his dad—for purposes that aren’t entirely clear—and a young girl who is using him to get into these houses while being more attracted to a shithead.
What I Would Have Done Differently: The early character-development wasn’t there for me, and it made it that much harder to really root against Lang’s anguished, soulful monster.