Film Review - Breath (2018)

Breath is based off of the novel by Tim Winton who also helped write this screenplay adaptation and Simon Baker co writes, stars and directs this adaptation as Sando a surfer in 1970’s Australia who ends up befriending 2 young boys with a keen eye for adventure (Brock Fitzgerald and Ben Spence) but Sando’s wife Eva (Elizabeth Debicki) is not so keen for these young boys to be around so much.

Breath is a bit of a mixed bag that overall I found to be a pretty meh movie the more I began to think about it but in terms of the positives I did like of the scenic direction Mr Baker did with those big swelling waves, windy beaches and shots of under water swells those scenes had a slightly lyrical and strangely compelling feel to them.

Mainly because they had very little dialogue and that’s where this movie goes wrong the screenplay is all over the place bouncing from one storyline to the next in a very scrappy way at one point Simon Baker’s character is teaching them to surf then he disappears for a big chunk of the film one of the boys gets into surfing then doesn’t and after a while the film started to bore me a little bit as I didn’t find myself all that interested in any of the characters or the overall storytelling.

The best thing about this movie by far is Elizabeth Debicki who once again exudes sexiness as this late 60s early 70s flower child who also hides a terrible tragic incident and her sense of isolation and loneliness comes through in every scene she has she really does a lot to lift those scenes into something engaging and worthwhile and I was reminded of what an utterly captivating and charismatic actress she can be when given something to work with as she felt wasted in Guardians Volume 2 and the Man from UNCLE.

And so that was Breath which has a great performance by Ms Debicki and some nice scenery but a scattershot screenplay with boring characters, 2 out of 5.