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Back in the 1980s during the slasher movie heyday, you could find any number of movies that warned ‘Don’t’ do something like ‘go in the basement’ or ‘open the window’. LMN seems to be reviving that ‘Don’t’ genre with its latest thriller, Don’t Breathe a Word, following on the heels of the last LMN Original, Don’t Trust the Quiet Ones. The only problem is these titles are pretty nonsensical — the previous movie originally had a different title altogether, and the latest one is only tying itself to the name of a Lamaze studio, ‘Just Breathe’, but forces us to ask who are we not supposed to breathe a word to?
Let’s try to make some sense of this plot — a woman names Meredith (Jenny Heaton) owns a Lamaze studio. She has a partner (although it’s not clear if she’s financially involved) who is also her best friend, Eve (Amanda Button). Meredith has decided her calling in life is to help other women prepare for the birthing process following the loss of her own child during her pregnancy and being told that if she ever got pregnant again the same thing would happen. Meredith has taken one of her clients, Natalie (Emily Ferguson), under her wing as Natalie’s husband is in the military and may be unable to be present at the birth. If Natalie goes into labor, Meredith assures her she will be there if husband Nick isn’t. Meredith’s husband, Tyler (Tim Parrish), is a local Tampa cop, and they have a dog, Snickers (played by Finley). The dog gets way too much screen time which makes you expect something bad is going to happen to him. Meredith and Tyler are also godparents to Eve’s son, Lucas (Holden Smith), and are not above throwing a lavish birthday party for him, and giving him really expensive tickets to an amusement park as a gift (all of which seems a bit condescending to Eve, blatantly reminding her that even though she is Meredith’s ‘partner’ she can’t afford the nicer things in life). Meredith also has a strong dislike for Eve’s ex, Brian (Blake Wright), whom Eve seems to still have a thing for. With all of that established, things kick into gear when Meredith goes to the studio one day to find it vandalized, the windows spray painted and broken, the interior ransacked, and her computer stolen. Looking at the security footage, a lone figure dressed like a ninja appears, looks at the camera and spray paints over the lens. Brian just happens to own a martial arts studio, so Meredith is certain he is responsible (though the figure in the video definitely does not have the same build as Brian). Eve gets very agitated every time Meredith brings up Brian, and it gets even worse when Meredith confronts him — several times — and he finally has had enough and tells her to ask Eve what her real name is. Huh? Plot twist?
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Things continue to get out of hand as Meredith begins to see someone outside of her house, but luckily she has a police officer husband so he is pretty much at her beck and call while he’s on duty, and he does find a boot print in the mud where his wife claimed she saw someone (yes, they were wearing a black hoodie … and a full head covering as an added accessory). As Meredith becomes more certain Brian is terrorizing her, Eve begins to unravel and is acting erratically. One day, Meredith gets a call from Lucas’ school that he’s sick but they can’t reach his mother. Meredith is on the approved pick-up list so she goes to get Lucas until she can get in touch with Eve. When Eve finally shows up at the house, she completely freaks out at Meredith for taking Lucas from school — even though she designated Meredith to do so — warning her to never take her son again without calling her first (she did and Eve was not answering her phone, and her whereabouts at that time are still unknown). We haven’t even gotten to the halfway point by this time in the movie! Meredith has had enough of Eve’s weird behavior and she and Tyler pay a visit to the Clearwater police to find out who Eve Mills really is — and they learn that she’s been dead for ten years after a tragic car accident that killed her and her baby. The sheriff, Rudy (Wade Hunt Williams), gives them very little information but they see in police records that Tyler accesses — even though he tells Meredith he’s not allowed to — that the real Eve lived in a small town two hours away so they play detective and go to the address, which is a deserted cabin deep off the grid. Finding nothing, they leave and Meredith trips over a locked chain on the porch, never stopping to think how odd that is (this harkens back to the movie’s prologue scene where Meredith is seen crying out for help, her face visible between slats of wood, the main story taking place two weeks before that moment). She has another confrontation with ‘Eve’, who is packing to get out of town, then Natlie goes into labor and Meredith is with her, and just after the birth husband Nick (Kellen Jackson) arrives. Meredith goes back to the martial arts studio to confront Brian, but she can’t because he’s dead in a pool of blood. While calling 911, someone attacks Meredith. Tyler shows up because he’s the only cop in town, and when he calls Meredith, her phone rings on the floor right next to him (he didn’t see it laying there?). And now we’ve circled back to the beginning with Meredith trapped under the porch, but the wood is so rotted it only takes her a few minutes to get out. Tyler — and a few other officers! — arrive at Eve’s house and find both her and Lucas gone but their belongings are still there. Meredith finds Eve tied up inside the cabin, but someone is coming … introducing a new character never mentioned up until now, Creighton (Cameron Moir), who is Eve’s baby daddy. And her real name is Gina. He’s got a chip on his shoulder because he blames her for getting him arrested and incarcerated for ten years, but now he just wants to get the family back together whether she likes it or not. Meredith tries to help, but only gets herself tied up outside with Gina while Creighton goes for a nap. Tyler calls Sheriff Rudy, who answers his landline phone apparently in the middle of the forest while on a fishing trip, and he warns Tyler to stay out of his jurisdiction, but Tyler begins to see that things aren’t adding up. Meredith and Gina manage to get themselves untied, and instead of trying to make an escape to get help, they just create a distraction to lure Creighton out of the house. They manage to overpower him and Gina stabs him in the leg, warning him she’ll do it again if he doesn’t tell her where Lucas is. He finally gives in and they take a walk through the woods — I think — to another cabin where they find … Sheriff Rudy and Lucas. And Rudy ain’t too happy to see what these women have done to … his son. Can Meredith, Gina and Lucas make it out of this situation alive? Will Tyler, who somehow enlisted complete stranger Nick to help (he showed up at the house to return some sparkly gold baby shoes Meredith had gifted Natalie), be able to find them before it’s too late (luckily Nick is a Marine and he can use the Marine code to get the former Marine deputy to give them the address of Sheriff Rudy’s cabin)? Will any of this make any sense by the time the credits roll? And if you’re wondering, yes, something did happen to Snickers but luckily it wasn’t fatal.
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There is a lot going on in this movie, and it leaves some major plot lines dangling. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say unnecessary plotlines. Writer Eric Bergemann could have constructed a pretty solid ‘she isn’t who she says she is’ thriller without all of the stalker stuff. It’s never clear who trashed the studio. We see the person’s eyes but they don’t seem to match any of the main actors. We never know who was outside of Meredith’s house. The boot print Tyler took a cast of doesn’t match anything Brian has, and then he is murdered … but by who? I suppose we’re left to assume Creighton is the culprit but why would he trash the studio (and the ninja comes nowhere close to resembling him) and stalk Meredith? Or are we meant to believe Eve is behind this? The ninja could have sort have been her, but why would she want to destroy her place of business and her best friend’s livelihood? And who would have given Snickers the chocolate that made him sick? It is the same kind of chocolate that Lucas likes, so that again makes us think Eve is the suspect because how would Creighton even know where Meredith lives (or even who she is)? There really is a much better story here that could have dropped all of that nonsense, ditched Eve’s erratic behavior and allowed her to come clean to Meredith sooner, brought Creighton into the story earlier and had him perhaps just abduct Lucas in order to lure Eve/Gina to him, setting up the climax. As it stands, it makes no sense for Brian to have been murdered or Meredith to be abducted. These are sloppy plot devices and, again, makes one think that perhaps ChatGPT is the real ‘author’ of this screenplay. Director Lindsay Hartley does a nice job at following the script, but at some point she should have questioned how any of it made sense. Did a lot of it end up on the cutting room floor for time? Besides the whole stalking/murder/abduction stuff, why would Nick, who you’d think would want to be spending time with his wife and new baby before returning to duty, just out of the blue agree to join Tyler to search for Meredith simply because she did her job and took care of Natalie in his absence? And again with the plot device — Tyler knew the deputy was a Marine so he was just basically using Nick because he saw that he is a Marine, willfully putting a new dad in danger. Was there no one at his precinct who could have assisted him? And then we hear sirens, many sirens, approaching the location of the cabin at the end and the only people who appear are Tyler and Nick? This is all just starting to make me mad now.
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So what about the cast? Jenny Heaton does what she can with the role of Meredith. She is a calming influence on her clients, but she can be condescending to her friend and borderline hysterical as she’s always calling her husband to the point you wonder if he’s just humoring her. Heaton goes through all of the emotions, but the writing just puts her all over the place, making her seem a bit unbalanced. Amanda Button has it even worse because she’s forced to go through irrational mood swings, highlighted by the scene in which she totally freaks out about Meredith picking up Lucas from school, even though she was authorized to do so when Eve was unreachable. She could have simply thanked Meredith, but Eve’s reaction would have been one in which any rational person would have just stepped away from that toxic ‘friendship’ because it wasn’t the only time she behaved that way (and whoever did her make-up must have been the same person who did JLo’s Golden Globes look … IYKYK). I’m sure there is a good performance in there somewhere, but the writing for her character is just a mess.
Faring a bit better is Tim Parrish as Tyler. He gives Heaton complete support even as she has to run a gamut of different emotion, and he never allows his performance to devolve into doubting her. He keeps Tyler on an even keel even when it seems like he’s the only cop in Tampa. It would have been nice if he’d had a partner or someone at the station to work with. Cameron Moir is only given one note to play as Creighton, but he plays it well, always with a sense of menace, with not an ounce of sympathy. He is imposing and a real threat to the safety of Eve/Gina and Meredith. Wade Hunt Williams — who is becoming quite the LMN regular with his third movie in the last few weeks — does a good job as Sheriff Rudy, really being a complete professional when Tyler and Meredith call on him, believably selling the idea that he vaguely remembers the Eve Mills case from a decade ago. Even his own character’s motivation makes sense, and he plays it all very well. When you look at it, you realize that the main male characters come off much better, more stable, than the two female characters, almost as if the male writer has never had a real interaction with a woman, or has some axe to grind with females in general.
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The other actor make do with what they’re given. Emily Ferguson makes Natalie feel authentic with her concerns about being alone when giving birth, Kellen Jackson is fine as Nick in his few short scenes making him a real upstanding guy, Blake Wright plays Brian with a perpetual chip on his shoulder to make him the obvious suspect in everything until he isn’t, and Holden Smith does a good job at making Lucas feel like a real kid in some extraordinary circumstances. Credit to them, and perhaps the director’s guidance, on doing their best at making their characters believable. And we can’t forget Finley who does a great job as Snickers, making us worry more about his safety than any of the humans. There could have been a really good movie here, and perhaps there was in the script since we don’t know what, if anything, was cut from the final edit, but as it stands Don’t Breathe a Word just throws too many things at the wall to see what sticks, fails to address too many plot points, and does a disservice to its main female characters. It’s hard to recommend outside of some of the performances.
Don’t Breathe a Word has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.