Movie Breakdown: Every Breath You Take (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
You know, it’s got a pretty bang-up cast – Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Sam Claflin – and the trailer paints a somber sort of stalker thriller. I say, why not.
Post-Screening Ramble:
On paper, Every Breath You Take seems a pretty simple film. A psychiatrist (Casey Affleck) and his wife (Michelle Monaghan) are grieving the traumatic death of their youngest son. Their relationship and their family are falling apart until the arrival of James (Sam Claflin), the also grieving brother of one of Affleck’s patients who recently killed herself. For reasons to be revealed, the brother starts to slowly pick at the family, tearing them further and further apart. Affleck’s psychiatrist plays a sort of Cassandra role, knowing that the brother is bad and trying to warn his family, only to be disbelieved until … you get the picture. It is a pretty basic, if not wholly unoriginal, set-up for a low-key psycho-thriller starring some pretty big names. And though those basic genre bones are slightly visible, director Vaughn Stein wraps them in a thick, wooly blanket of sadness and then stretches the believability of the plot to fairly ludicrous lengths in the process, forcing his characters to act entirely sporadically to continue to drive the plot forward. The dialogue in this film seems pulled from a “how to write a grieving family” pamphlet and even actors of this caliber can only choke out the lines. The end of the film is the sort of long, painful reveal of what’s really going on that demands a ten minute monologue of exposition before the train really goes off the tracks and every psycho-thriller trope is tossed into the meat grinder. It’s both messy and predictable and Claflin’s sudden shift from creepy guy with a vengeance thing to a cackling madman is laughable in the wrong way. The simple ones are sometimes the hardest to get right. This is the case here.
One Last Thought:
I don’t buy Michelle Monaghan as a bitter, middle-aged woman. Not one bit.
