Hold Your Breath (2024)

Score: 2.5 / 5

The Dust Bowl is an inspired setting for horror. 1933 Oklahoma, a rural farmhouse surrounded by barren plains. Storms can whip up dirt and dust that blot out the sun entirely, caking the surface of everything, causing terrible damage to throats and lungs. Hold Your Breath, directed by Karrie Crouse and Will Joines (and written by Crouse) and released as a Hulu exclusive feature last October, uses this setting to maximum effect. Certain elements of the film are quite stunning, including its mostly daylit scenes of horror, the vicious winds whipping up clouds of dust, and the typically masterful central performance by the always reliable and eminently watchable Sarah Paulson. For these, it's definitely worth a watch for a fun, chilling movie night at home.

Margaret Bellum (Paulson) is struggling to keep her family afloat. Her husband Henry is away, moved to Philadelphia for a construction job after their farmland was wasted by nature, leaving Margaret alone to care for their two surviving daughters. Ada, their youngest, died from scarlet fever some time previously. Of the survivors, teen Rose (Amiah Miller) helps to care for the younger Ollie, who is deaf and mute from the same scarlet fever that killed her sister. Margaret has sworn not to leave their home and Ada's grave, though Henry had pleaded with her to join him. In her grief, Margaret had begun sleepwalking and blacking out, so she takes sleeping pills to prevent any dangerous or violent episodes.

One night, Rose reads Ollie a scary story about "the Gray Man," a vagabond, murderous character who can dissolve into dust and shadows and enter houses and bodies through the smallest cracks and crevices. Once inside, he can influence your soul and make you do unnamed "terrible things." Disturbing sexual connotations aside (which are not explicit in the screenplay, mind), the story itself influences the girls' minds. Soon after, when stories circulate of a mysterious wandering man murdering a nearby family, the girls and their mother batten down their hatches and work overtime to seal up their house. Margaret, seemingly vulnerable without her husband around, becomes more anxious and paranoid about protecting their property until she suddenly discovers a drifter man hiding in her barn.

The thin plot won't hold if I describe more of it to you, so we'll leave things there. Suffice it to say that, as a premise, Hold Your Breath is nothing new beyond its setting and trappings, which are absolutely worth watching. Its story has been ripped and replicated too often: a single grieving mother watching after two ill or otherwise problematic children, attempting to protect them from supernatural evils prowling around their home. The Others is the obvious Gothic parallel (indeed, I'd say Hold Your Breath is a rare Western Gothic story, which is very fun to think about), but we usually see this in apocalyptic movies like Bird Box or even this year's Never Let Go. As you know from those examples, the external threat is often secondary to the internal one: something is off with mother. The strain of protecting children single-handedly or the crippling grief of bereavement are the first stones cracking in the dam; by the time her mental state deteriorates entirely, best to find high ground.

Frustratingly, the film never really rises beyond its compelling and contrived premise. Moments that suggest increased melodrama and thematic stakes are few and far between, mostly mobilized by Annaleigh Ashford (Broadway darling) as Esther, a nearby neighbor who also seems to be declining rapidly. I'd have liked more consideration of her as a parallel or foil to Margaret, and for the film to engage more with the hardships of simply living in the Dust Bowl. Even pushing the characters to madness could have made for a fascinating character study of the steps leading from motherhood to insanity under impossible conditions. After all, that's what Paulson does best!

Some really wonderful scenes of tense drama are strung together by haphazard transitions and lazy writing thick with exposition in unconvincing and inconsistent spurts. Similarly, visually, there are a few really effective gems that never quite scare but have haunted me since viewing a few nights ago. Taken together, and ignoring the occasionally baffling CGI dust storms, the film highlights the economic efficacy of a powerhouse performance from a powerhouse actress doing the most with a screenplay doing the least. It's just too bad the filmmakers decided to up the ante in ways that distract and undermine the raw potential of the nightmare they've crafted.