Breathe sees Milla Jovovich return to the apocalypse. Except instead of battling it out with zombies, mutated creatures, and humans, Jovovich is battling humans who are just as desperate as her to survive. In this world, oxygen is a rarity, and communities are separated into the last surviving humans. Jovovich is one part of one of those communities and she will do what she can to get into a family’s compound to see what their oxygen machine is like and how it works. But the family, headed by the multi-talented Jennifer Hudson, isn’t going to take this incursion lightly. This is her home and she’ll do what she has to protect herself and her children.
We get to see a lot of fighting, a sepia-color scale world, and two women desperately trying to survive in the trailer below. But the most interesting part of this is that Jovovich is the interloper. After her long run in the Resident Evil movie series, we’ve come to see her as the heroine. She isn’t. Hudson is. And that’s a refreshing shift in gears because Hudson is super talented and should be in more movies, and we don’t get nearly as many apocalyptic films with Black lead characters as the central focus of the story or conflict in question. It’s movies like Breathe that normalize the Black experience across different genres and make it so minorities aren’t just side characters to the white lead, as we’ve seen time and time again.
When looking through the IMDb, it is a little concerning that the story is written by a white man, Doug Simon. If we’re going to tell Black stories then we should have Black writers in the writers room full-stop. But the fact that Breathe is directed by Stefon Bristol calms some of those nerves. He directed See You Yesterday, a sci-fi adventure about two Black teenage prodigies who use time travel to save a relative who was wrongfully killed. It’s on Netflix. Watch it. So here’s hoping that Breathe continues to drive forward a need for diverse storytelling, no matter what genre we’re in.
Watch the official trailer below:
Breathe hits theaters on April 26, 2024.
