Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Every Breath You Take’ on VOD, a Glum Thriller Pitting Psychologist Casey Affleck Against Plain-Psycho Sam Claflin

Now on VOD, Every Breath You Take is truly shocking, mostly because there haven’t been 100 other movies titled Every Breath You Take before now. Far less shocking is how the film is a thriller in which a crazed sort-of-stalker fella terrorizes a family by not necessarily watching every move they make and every smile they fake, but something in that creepy-ass vein. The primary question we’ll address here is whether or not it deserves a talented cast including Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan and Sam Claflin, or if they’re just slumming it in a flick that just tacked a Police lyric title on the first page of the script (trivia: it was originally called You Belong to Me!) in the hope that it might be a little less forgettable.

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nighttime. Grace (Monaghan) is driving her son to his hockey game as he sits in the backseat telling corny jokes, and if you don’t feel that truck’s-gonna-broadside-’em vibe, I hope you’re enjoying the first movie you’ve ever seen. So anyway, a truck broadsides them, and it’s horrific. The boy doesn’t make it. Cut to a year or seven later; it’s never specified. Grace swims and swims and swims laps in the pool outside her and Phillip’s (Affleck) gigantic concrete neo-fortress-home in the woods. She’s blank and empty, just like the interior design. He glumly watches other kids at hockey practice. The boy was her child from another relationship; his kid, Lucy (India Eisley), is a cig-smoking gothster who just got expelled for bringing lowercase-c coke to chem class. Grace and Phillip’s marriage is in shambles. He’s closed off and she’s angry and neither knows what to do about the smoldering teen upstairs. They all live in separate worlds, partly because the house is so goddamn big.

Grace is a real estate agent, so maybe she got a deal on the property. Phillip is a psychotherapist with a hell of a lot of knowledge about the cycle of grief, but he never seems to apply it to his own life. (Maybe taking down the framed Rorschach blots that line their dining room would help oust the bleak atmosphere at home? Just a suggestion.) His patient, Daphne (Emily Alyn Lind), made a major breakthrough, from heavily medicated hospitalization to prescription-free stability, thanks to his unusual methodology. She’s so strong thanks to Dr. Phillip, she stood up to her abusive boyfriend and dropped him like a morning deuce. Until she calls Phillip in a panic one day, and by that evening, she’s dead, having thrown herself off a balcony. Her brother James (Claflin) arrives on the scene, distraught. And suddenly, Phillip’s experimental psychotherapeutic techniques are suspect.

Phillip and Grace and Lucy are about to sit down to Thai takeout one evening when James rings the doorbell. He wants to return a book Daphne had borrowed; he ends up staying for dinner. Then James seems to be everywhere. He contacts Grace about selling Daphne’s house — which is also about 9,000 square feet — and they start getting “friendly.” He bumps into Lucy after her first lousy day at (gasp!) public school, and suggest they be “friends”; they go out on a secret date and he wins her a stuffed rabbit at a carnival, and I’m disappointed to report that at no point does it get boiled. Phillip becomes the subject of numerous complaints blaming him for Daphne’s death, and they’re totally anonymous unless you have three-to-seven functioning brain cells. Put all this together, and it sure seems like someone has an agenda against this family, whose current stormy turmoil is about to turn into a hurricane of hysteria.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Superficially? Blue Velvet, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Jeepers Creepers and Feeling Minnesota. But it cribs its thriller-isms from Fatal Attraction, Cape Fear and Cold Creek Manor, a movie you forgot existed, but that I’ll NEVER forget existed, so help me Dorff.

Performance Worth Watching: Claflin turns his winning persona into a reasonably convincing, overplayed psycho nut whose smile is so untrustworthy, it’s only a notch or two down the chain from Jack Nicholson.

Memorable Dialogue: “It’s not enough to love somebody. You have to let them feel that you love them.” — Phillip tries to wedge psychobabble into his real life

Sex and Skin: Sorry, but “brief sexuality” isn’t enough to elevate this into Preposterous Thriller territory.

Our Take: The rainy setting of Every Breath You Take, presumably somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, is never specifically identified. But from a less literal standpoint, the story begins in Drizzleton, Oregon and ends up in Eyeroll City. It’s tedious and depressing, until it’s bag-of-hammers dumb. The first act is a heavy-handed, but relatively realistic portrait of grief, and by the third act, it’s a senselessly bazonkers suspense-thriller with a seen-it-coming twist, sluggish car chases and grueling violence. It features a portrayal of mental illness straight out of a 1940s B-picture, the type that makes Strom Thurmond look like a Black Lives Matter activist.

This is dismal, dismal stuff. It initially appears to be a rumination on trauma in the wake of loss, but ultimately has nothing to say about it. Monaghan’s character is broadstroked as shrill and defensive, and Affleck, never prone to overexpression, profoundly underplays, mumbling glumly through an uninspired screenplay. Director Vaughn Stein rouses some tension down the stretch, but by that point, the movie has fed all plausibility to the pigeons. The tone is so stifling, it’d make a lousy hate-watch. I did not like this movie because it’s annoying and it sucks.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Every Breath You Take puts the do-do in de-do-do-do de-da-da-da.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Every Breath You Take