Every Breath You Take Review: This Film Has A Sting But No Bite

Here's our review for Every Breath You Take starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Sam Claflin and Veronica Ferres and directed by Vaughn Stein

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Published on Apr 29 2021, 16:49:01

Every Breath You Take Review: This Film Has A Sting But No Bite

The title of this handsomely mounted clumsily crafted film is borrowed from a song by Sting which we all love. The film has a certain sting to its tale but ultimately it lacks bite as it succumbs rather shamefully to all the tropes of the B-grade suspense thriller, including the villain attacking a woman alone in a big dark house with knives, guns and other instruments of bodily damaged strewn everywhere.

Just why the house must be dark and why a woman must be alone when she knows danger lurks are questions that no longer beg for an answer. These are things that happen in suspense/horror movies. Deal with it.

To begin with Every Breath You Take has a certain chic deportment to it. Characters who move around in the best homes and finest cars and wear only labels.Casey Affleck(an actor I always look forward to seeing) plays Philip ,a psychiatrist who uses unorthodox means of treating a suicidal patient Daphne (the very beautiful Emily Alyn Lind) .All hell breaks loose when Daphne commits suicide , and her brother James(Sam Claflin) shows up to take revenge.

From here it is downhill all the way.The suave sexy seductive etc etc (we’ve take the script’s word for it) James proceeds to seduce everyone in Philip’s family. I nearly expected James to seduce Philip as well..metrosexual meta-male and all. But the screenwriter’s wild imagination stops short of tripping over its polished face.

The film is filled with gleaming surfaces which mirror an aching emptiness at the heart. Some of the twists in the plot are so clumsy and amateurish I wondered who hired David Murray to write this film. I must mention one long embarrassing sequence where Philip’s wife(the talented Michelle Monaghan here reduced to thinking not with her head but her vagina) foolishly gets into the car with the villain, is chased down by the hero. The villain simply abandons the car in the middle of the road and flees.

If we were watching this film in a theatre I can imagine the sniggers it would evoke. Every Break You Take is selfaware of every move it makes. It is filled with difficult complicated characters who are not intriguing or interesting. Just plain annoying. The deserve the treatment the script gives them.We don’t.

Image Source: Instagram/everybreathmovie, kinopika