Cloaked woman sat in desert with pipe in Breathing In (2023) review

Ever since there has been war, there has been art about war. Viewers at the 2023 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival were lucky enough to see the world premiere of Jaco Bouwer's film Breathing In, a tense thriller about the trauma of war and colonisation, and the corrosive effects on power.

Based on South African writer Reza De Wet's play of the same name, Breathing In takes place in 1901 during the Second Anglo-Boer War. A soldier named Brand (Sven Ruygrok) arrives at the decrepit temporary home of a mother and a daughter watching over a wounded general. They're hidden away, safe for the moment from the concentration camps where many Boer civilians were placed during the war. Brand becomes an unwilling participant in a disturbing triangle orchestrated by the mother (Michele Burgers, who is stunningly terrifying in this role).

The home where the mother and daughter take shelter at night is lit only by a handful of candles, giving it an eerie and intimate vibe. The rain drips outside (and inside), and it is constant. In Breathing In, there is an endlessness that dominates the mood – the rain is endless, the night Brand spends with the women is endless, the war raging on the outside is endless. The viewer is immediately pulled into this tense world, where the characters all initially appear to be locked into this void, whether time has ceased to matter. What happens during the war will ultimately determine their fate, and they have no control over their future.

Or so it seems initially. The mother controls everything she possibly can inside her humble home. Most notably, she doesn't allow her neurasthenic daughter to sleep. Her daughter confides in Brand, "My mother keeps me awake. She says if I sleep, it'll be so deep, and I'll fall and fall, and keep falling, and leave her behind forever." Burgers’s expressive face contorts with emotion; she goes from pleading and lost, to cruel and powerful throughout the film, and her performance brings to mind Piper Laurie's chilling turn as Margaret White in Brian De Palma's Carrie.

From the start, the mother uses her daughter to lure in Brand. It is uncomfortable to watch her dress her daughter up as if she is a doll and brush her long hair – and even more uncomfortable as she turns on a dime from tenderly brushing her daughter's hair to pulling it, never allowing the younger woman a moment to rest. Just as the mother intended, Brand is instantly bewitched by her beautiful daughter. In hard-to-watch scenes that blur boundaries, the mother encourages this attraction, even telling her daughter to sit on Brand's lap at one point, and gleefully spying on the two as they exchange kisses and embraces.

The more time Brand spends in this cloistered environment, the more he cannot trust what he sees and experiences. Is he seeing cloven hooves instead of feet, or are his eyes playing tricks on him? Has he been with the unsettling mother-daughter duo for hours or days? Composer Pierre-Henri Wicomb's spooky orchestral music explodes into chaos as the tension between the women and Brand grows, and it provides the perfect soundtrack for Brand's growing confusion, and terror. In the end, he is faced with a heartbreaking decision that he could not have imagined when he knocked at the women's door.

The opening shot of Breathing In shows a horse pulling a wagon across an empty stretch of land, reminding viewers of the colonisation that prompted the Second Anglo-Boer War. While the horrors of war haunt the film more explicitly, the evils of colonisation more subtly lurk beneath the surface. As the mother eventually divulges more about the traumas of her past, it becomes apparent that this devastating film derives much of its tension from the power plays that exist between people (or groups of people). Breathing In brings these horrors to life in unexpected ways, and this excellent film will linger in the viewer's mind long after it ends.

Breathing In is now available on several streaming services.