Stefon Bristol
In cinemas (US); on demand from 20 May (UK)
Behind the hard-to-open bulkhead doors of a homemade 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), plot would have barely filled a quarter-hour.
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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 a lie. 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 A Quiet Place, whose gargoyle-like aliens chomp down on anything and anyone that makes a sound.
Still, it is hard to think of a movie genre so resistant to innovation. While it solves the problem of small budgets, the one-room scenario doesn’t play to sci-fi’s strengths. The best one-room thrillers are regular thrillers. In Geoffrey Household’s unforgettable 1939 novel Rogue Male, to take an extreme example, Adolf Hitler’s would-be assassin is foiled and has to hide under a hedge.
The trick, when writing sci-fi versions of such stories, is to treat seriously the MacGuffin that created your scenario. The monsters of Bird Box, first invented by Josh Malerman for his 2014 novel, are a wonderfully insolent, high-concept proposition. The big-eared raptors of A Quiet Place are only marginally less convincing.
A couple of years later, with low-budget The Midnight Sky, the scraping of the barrel became almost palpable. In it, radiation (that’s all you are getting, radiation) has to stand in for what we really tuned in for: a display of malign, cackling inventiveness.
In 2010, Breathe‘s screenwriter Doug Simon co-wrote a low-budget film called Brotherhood, for me a far more successful one-room thriller about a college fraternity initiation rite gone horribly wrong. Turning to sci-fi, Simon seems to have made the frequent and fatal assumption that the genre comes with all the necessary inventiveness built in.
Why has the oxygen vanished, more or less overnight, from Breathe‘s gasping Earth? It isn’t as if we needed a rational explanation, just a compelling one. In its place, we get a story that can feel as sterile as the planet it is set on.
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Jack Smight
Loosely based on Roger Zelazny’s novel, the film sees Earth tilted on its axis by nuclear armageddon and infested by giant scorpions. Its effects budget was cruelly cut to pay for Star Wars.
Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on Instagram at @simon_ings
