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This one-room sci-fi thriller should take its MacGuffin more seriously

In Breathe, Earth is stripped of its oxygen, the plants are dead, oceans are dried up, no one trusts anyone — but we don't know what caused it. This sci-fi film fails to stand out among superior one-room thrillers, says Simon Ings

By Simon Ings

24 April 2024

Quvenzhane Wallise in Breathe

To survive outdoors, Zora needs an oxygen suit made by her father

Ryan Collerd/Signature Entertainment

Breathe
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…

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