Every Breath You Take (2021) - Movie Review

It’s almost embarrassing having to admit that I’ve seen this movie. Both for myself, in that I paid money to sit through this thing, and for those involved, as this should only exist as a blip on each actor’s respective radar, not something to be remembered or directly attributed to them. But I’ve made it this far writing reviews for every new film I watch, and I’m not about to give this the satisfaction of breaking that trend, so let’s get into one of the snooziest dumpster fires I’ve seen in years.

For a start, it’s a psychological thriller in the most clinical sense possible, in that it’s a thriller involving psychology with Affleck as a therapist dealing with the fallout of one of his clients committing suicide. The way it dives into character psychology is… so threadbare that I already regret using a word as strong as ‘dive’ to describe it. There’s bits of grief floating around like airborne particles against the sterile visuals, but it doesn’t amount to much beyond throwing back to old-school ‘crazy is all the motive you need’ domestic thriller nonsense.

Not only that, but for a story intrinsically about clinical psychology, its approach to mental health is so frustratingly glib as to be a tad insulting. Only a tad, though, as it’s difficult to take it too seriously after showing Affleck’s home with all the framed Rorschach blots on the walls. If he was a gastroenterologist, he'd probably have stool samples in jars on all the bookshelves, such is the subtlety of this set design.

It’s also difficult to take seriously when, even though the script is quite adamant on throwing the audience off, the impact made on the characters or the plot at large is negligible. I mean, there are twists in the narrative, but they’re presented in such blasé fashion that they don’t even register as change-ups. It hits a lot of the beats for homewrecker thrillers (I had quite a few flashbacks to The Boy Next Door while watching this), so the twists themselves are obvious… but I’ll admit, I didn’t see the bigger ones coming, not for lack of trying but for lack of caring.

As hyperbolic as this statement usually is when discussing any film, this doesn’t even feel like a film. It’s more like Stilnox at 24 doses a second. The visuals are so icy that I might as well have been staring at analog TV static for all the engagement I got out of them, the cast is disappointing (for Sam Claflin in a crazed villain role, he is about as restrained as everyone else, sad boi Affleck included), and for how much mental illness and suicide are part of the story, it is frankly worrying what little impact it made through all its thematic mumbling. Even films like Kidnapped got some kind of visceral response from their plot developments, whereas I had actual difficulty even noticing what this film deemed to be the big ‘twists’. If this was just trash, that’d be one thing, but being this unbelievably dull is somehow even worse.