Every Breath You Take Parent Guide

Psychiatry is a challenging medical specialty, with lots of judgment calls and plenty of room for error. For Dr. Phillip Clark (Casey Affleck), everything, including his professional life, has been more difficult since the death of his young son in a car accident. But things are finally looking up. Phillip is pleased that his young patient Daphne (Emily Alyn Lind), is progressing well…until she is unexpectedly found dead in front of her home. While he searches for answers, Phillip meets Daphne’s brother, James (Sam Claflin), an author with a surfeit of tragedy in his life. The bereaved young man soon befriends Phillip’s wife Grace (Michelle Monaghan) and daughter Lucy (India Eisley)…but Phillip is beginning to feel uneasy.

Thrillers are built on suspense, and they fall apart quickly without it. The problem with Every Breath You Take is that you can guess the big twist ending approximately three minutes in. Not only does knowing the ending make the rest of the story uninteresting, it leaves you free to notice just how many cliches this movie is using. Not a winning combination.

Family audiences will have their own issues with this movie. There’s some profanity, although considerably less than I expected, and some social drinking and off-screen violence. There are also several brutal assaults, brief depictions of domestic violence, references to suicide, a stabbing, a number of scenes which involve an adult kissing a teenager, and references to teenagers using cocaine. Most of the negative content isn’t explicit but the Restricted rating is still justified.

For my money, there are better thrillers out there – even ones for which I already know the ending. Someone needs to tell director Vaughn Stein that modern luxury home design is not a substitute for an actual plot. In fairness, Stein has spent almost his entire career directing second and third units, which usually include action scenes and pick-ups or establishing shots. While I can’t fault the technical production of the film, the story just doesn’t keep up, and the easy giveaways early in the film don’t help. This is a film about obsession; but it barely inspires interest, let alone fascination.