Gothic horror meets the sprawling American Dust Bowl in Hold Your Breath , the feature-length debut from directors Cary Cross and Will Goins. The film often does too much, drawing on a variety of different sources for its attempts at thrills and chills, resulting in a mostly scattered experience. However, it has two notable strengths. The first is a handful of tense moments. The second is its sense of the madness surrounding illness, in ways that echo the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Both of these points eventually fade, but what remains constant throughout its running time is a committed lead performance from Sarah Paulson, who proves once again that horror would be worse without her. Her absence from the genre for just three years feels like too long, even if she deserves a stronger return.
Set in 1933, the Oklahoma Panhandle is ravaged by a devastating dust storm. With her husband away building bridges out of state, Margaret (Paulson) is left to care for her two daughters, teenage Rose (Amia Miller) and teenage Ollie (the wonderfully deaf-mute Alona Jean Robbins), shortly after her third daughter succumbs to the disease. Death lingers in the air like germs. This feeling is pervasive in every frame, thanks to the film’s sickly, faded palette. Every scene has Margaret anxiously aroused by the dust that not only settles on every surface, but floats through the air, seeping into her home through tiny cracks. Cross and Goines frequently cut to the point of view of the person glinting off these tiny (though still fully visible) pieces of debris, before using Paulson’s paranoid expression to build unease in quiet moments.
But Hold Your Breath is also a loud film, and while its loud moments wouldn’t work without the aforementioned contrast of silence, it relies heavily on sudden bursts of sound to disturb viewers. The first few times Margaret’s green dreams are interrupted by sudden storms—accompanied by Paulson’s screams and the wind’s howling—it proves to be a surprise. Still, it’s a trick the film relies on over and over again, to the point where it becomes mechanical. After a while, the result isn’t so much creepy or disturbing as it is annoying and predictable.
While the film tells the story of a small rural community and their safety rituals—like tying ropes to their doors so they can get home during severe storms—Margaret’s daughters are also engrossed in a storybook. This terrifying fairy tale tells of a mysterious figure, the Grey Man, who creeps into people’s homes like dust and makes them do horrific things. Meanwhile, hints about Margaret’s health emerge following the death of her daughter a few years earlier. She is now taking pills to curb sleepwalking and other dangerous behavior.
It’s not hard to piece together the concerns the Gray Man poses for Margaret (the film evokes a distinctly modern unease about airborne diseases, with characters wearing masks for safety) or what Margaret’s role in the film might ultimately be, given her past. However, the many detours ensure that the story spins in circles for long stretches before Paulson is allowed to dive into its most enjoyable territory. It’s a joy to watch, even when the rest of the film isn’t.
Adding to the drama, rumors of a local hobo and murderer coincide with the arrival of a stranger at Margaret’s (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) home, a priest who claims to know her husband and also appears to have supernatural powers. Moss-Bachrach walks a fine line between comfort and suspicion, aided by the girls’ bedtime story concerns (could this be the Grey Man in human form?), but this subplot feels awkward in “Hold Your Breath” than in a completely different movie. Things move quickly from one premise to the next, yet very little happens along the way, despite this quick reveal.
Eventually, the film finds its way to the main story of a grieving mother struggling to protect her children from an unforgiving world—and herself. However, by the time it unleashes its most terrifying (and also most intimate) thoughts, it hasn’t gained enough wind speed to land with the resounding force it should.
