Breathe

The scouts

A ghost story filtered through a gimmick—the conceit is clever enough to make you wince at how obvious it is, which means Meakins is either smarter or more crass than the premise lets on, and I'm genuinely unsure which.

Meakins positions himself in the lineage of J-horror's formal precision and British gothic constraint, executing the breath-holding mechanic with the kind of disciplined visual syntax that recalls early Atemkino experiments—a measured exploration of absence as visibility.

The entire film hinges on Meakins' decision to use breath as the edit point itself: each exhalation triggers a cut back to blindness, making the editing rhythm do the narrative work most directors would waste dialogue on, and it's that one structural choice that transforms a one-liner into something genuinely haunting.

Reviews

It's a high concept idea that somehow feels pretty fresh when nestled amongst a genre that is so often rooted in cliche. Rather, it's a short shrouded in a fog of ominous, continued suspense.