Breathe

Directed by Stefon Bristol and starring Jennifer Hudson and Milla Jovovich, Breathe is a low-key sci-fi film set in a future where the breathable atmosphere has reached a tipping point, killing plants and wildlife, and forcing survivors to retreat underground into bunkers where oxygen generators keep them alive.  Expeditions to the outside require the use of portable oxygen tanks and breathing apparatus.   One family of survivors, Maya (Hudson), Darius (Common), and their daughter Zora (Quvenzhane Wallis) have survived in their self contained system thanks to a unique oxygen generator system that Darius created.  However, Darius leaves on a scavenging expedition and never returns, leaving the mother and daughter to survive on their own.   However, sometime later another group of survivors arrive at their door, claiming to have worked with Darius before the fall, and need to learn from his work on oxygen systems to ensure their own community can survive.  But can these strangers be trusted?

This is a simple film drawn from one of 2019’s hottest unmade scripts (Doug Simon’s screenplay was on the Black List of most liked unmade Hollywood screenplays), and plays with the themes of trust in an untrusting world.  When oxygen is a precious commodity, and resources are scarce, can you take someone at their word, and how do you know what is morally right or wrong, and can you risk those close to you in the hope that you can help others?  All of this is played out reasonably well, with Hudson and Jovovich standing out the strongest – as the somewhat leader of the strangers, Jovovich gets to do a lot more here dialogue wise than we have come to expect from her over the last decade or so.  The short bursts of action are well staged, and the sense of unease and uncertainty balances well for the most part.

However, the last act makes some choices that don’t quite work, and try too hard to tie up what would maybe have been better left ambiguous, becoming a little too formulaic after a set up that was more interesting because of the personal aspects.  In addition, overall it feels like a lot of this has been done so many times before that you can pretty much call every beat out before it plays, meaning that when it does devolve into formula, it diminishes the overall idea.

Still, it is a relatively short film, which has enough good elements within to allow it to be a simple diversion, and fans of this post-apocalyptical surivor genre should find enough to make it worth a watch.