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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


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 has its plant life. The oceans are all dried up. Survivors are…

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