This movie juggles many important and complex themes for teenage boys.. Dealing with and understanding fear, peer group pressure, shame, jealousy, the devastating effects of child abuse and the powerful forces of love and desire. This is all handled sensitively and authentically ,but for me, it is mainly about seeing or feeling something beautiful, for the first time, and knowing you will always want to be entwined with that beauty. It is also a movie about how important first impressions are at an impressionable age and how valuable loving, gentle parents are, at that time. It wouldn't surprise me if it won the academy award for best picture.

Simon Baker has nailed this adaptation of Tim Winton's novel and it was great to hear the author himself narrating the movie. Clever! The cinematography is beautiful, the story intense and atmospheric. You could feel the power of fear and adrenaline and almost taste the salty sea. Plus it stayed true to the novel which is always a plus.

Understated, avoided the usual melodrama while providing all the energy needed to drive the narrative forward. Felt more like a memory than a cinema experience. Hope to see more from Baker in the future.

A wonderful movie full of emotion.

Beautifully shot. So evocative of Australia in the 70s. Fizzled at the end though.

Wonderful Australian film. Cinematography is superb, makes you want to travel to WA to see it firsthand. Acting by all involved is very well done. Simon Baker has done a beautiful job with his first directorial role. Tim Winton narrates beautifully and that brings him into the scenes of this very Australian film. I couldn't fault it.

Oh The Tangled Web We Weave, The Story Being Semi-Auto Biographical From Master Story-Teller Tim Winton Is An Very Good Piece Of Reflective Writing In & Of Itself. This Visual Take Tries Notably To Re-Imagine The Spellbinding Nature Of Such Things, And Unless You Are Into Surfing, There Will Be Parts That Do Not Capture Your Imagination As Well As Winton. Simon Baker Has Done Well No Doubt Tho, This Era Of Surfing & Youth Culture, Minus Mobile Phones & Any Internet Connections Leaves Us Wondering (Myself Include As I Learned To Surf In The Early 80s) How Ever Did Kids Survive As Navigating Life's Pitfalls Minimal Supports. The Perspectives Of It All Here Are Troubling, But That Is Sets Tim Winton's Works Apart From Your Bog-Standard Youth-Angst Fiction Apart From Others. I Fell The Only Downfall Of This Film Adaptation Was It Lacked A Good Musical-Score-Soundtrack, It Is Visually Beautiful But Musically Dull. I Guess I Also Reimagined Some Parts Differently As I Am A Massive Fan Of This Story, Mostly Because I Can Relate To So Much Of It. All In All It's Good, Not Amazing...But Very Good. Hopefully It Connects More People With Winton's Work & The Aussie Landscape, A Connection To Environment, Aussie Culture & Adventure. It Certainly Let Me Reimagine My Childhood Connection To The Ocean, Australia & What Makes Me...Me.

Just thought it was a great coming of age movie set in some fantastic parts of the west australian coastline.

Understated awkward and honest, Breath is a sympathetic paean to Australian boyhood at the beach in the 1970s. It gets the little details - settings, characters, behaviours, social dynamics and it nails all of them. The restless bouncing feet, the quiet of the days with parents happy to see you home for dinner, the mix of young, raw, emotional beings growing up and out of the receding tide of old fashioned societal traditions that had been receding since the sixties. I lived as a boy in this time - albeit a few years younger, on the coasts of Southern Queensland and I truly felt I was back there for just shy of two hours.The film as you expect, picks threads from the book to form it's own story and leaves some others less explored or omitted. Sometimes this can leave a reader of the book version somewhat unsated. In the case of Breath, the special attention that is paid to the few relationships in Pikelets life, provides an unexpected new depth in the characters. Pikelets friendship with Loony - a conflict of laughter, rage, envy and wilfulness who is constantly dragging Pikelet out of his comfort zone gets the the most attention with the stories of these two young inarticulate boys largely written with the nuances of their behaviours, actions or hesitances rather than words.The casting of two young surfers Samson Coulter as Pikelet and Ben Spence as Loony has proved a masterstroke. Their authentic characterisations make this film. Simon Baker does the best work I have seen as the surf guru Sando in a role you sense he has been waiting his entire career for. It's no surprise he bought the rights. Elizabeth Debicki plays an Eva reeling from loss with matching understatement and honesty. Richard Roxburgh is also in fine form here conveying the stifled love, confusion and pain of a father watching his boy pursue a life that seems foreign and strange to him.There's no pantomime performances in Breath. No clean simple colours, no rights or wrongs, no life lessons. Life as a kid in the seventies with a board under your arm was far too wild for that.

This is a superbly filmed little jewel of an OZ movie finely crafted by Simon Baker, who obviously loves the book by Tim Winton on which the film is based. And it's as close as the ducks nuts to the book in tone and character. I wish it had been around when I was seventeen and had just been to the premiere of 'Morning of the Earth.' I reckon 17 year old guys will love this film. It's like 'Tea and Sympathy' for surfies. The auteroticism stuff has always intrigued me. The book came out around the time of the tragic death of Michael Hutchence, and I've always thought the book is a meditation by Tim on why someone would give up their breath for pleasure, when surfers and fishermen often nearly do involuntarily. Anyone who swims in the surf in OZ knows how much nearly drowning focuses the mind on living. The film has a meditative slow pace, like a surfer waiting for a wave. Like watching the sea rise and fall off the coast of Albany. I mean Angelus. It's an antidote to the 'give it to me now and fuckin hurry' obsession of the modern world. It's like watching a surfer imbued with grace dancing on the dawn. It's a fine cast, but it's Loony the grommet's movie for me. He's fuckin brilliant!

A great film about facing fears and how that creates adult character. Simon Baker as the Dad desperately seeking kids to complete his existence is quite good, and his bum does look great in a wetsuit.

Breath is simple, but meaningful. An adaption of the 2008 novel by Tim Winton, Breath is a coming-of-age story about two teen surfers in 1970's Australia. The two lead characters, Pikelet and Loonie, portrayed by Samson Coulter and Ben Spence have never acted before. Instead, cast on their ability to surf. Coulter and Spence both deliver impressive performances, alongside beautifully crafted cinematography. While it may not be perfect, it's Australian and it's good. Get to the cinema, then buy it on DVD and support the Australian Film Industry.

Beautiful to watch, it's amazing to see some of the South Coast of Western Australia represented on film in a lot of different moods and tones. Baker has done a great job in this regard. However, I feel his storytelling prowess, and perhaps the adaption of the novel (which I haven't read) let this down quite a lot. There are unfortunately a lot of tropes that don't seem to have moved on much past Winton's earlier novels. The coming of age story of a young boy, the stereotyped parents, the best mate, the high school romance story, the oblique mentor. None of this is particularly striking or fresh.

Frankly, I wanted to like Breath a lot more than I ultimately did. It has many aspects I like in a film on the surface, but the main characters aren't allowed a lot of fleshing out. It's almost as though it's assumed the viewer has read the book (which I haven't). The surfing scenes are spectacularly shot, the young unknown leads are solid but there's a lot of holes that aren't filled in. Why were Pikelet's parents so passive as their son repeatedly took off with a stranger at the crack of dawn? What was it that made him so afraid? (A large theme is overcoming fears) There are other spoilery questions, There was a good film in Breath, it's obvious from what does come across on screen, but it didn't pack any of the emotional depth it should have.

The cinematography is breathtaking, and the look at australian culture, the themes of fear, IDENTITY, MAKE up for the somewhat lacking overall plot drives and pace.