The framing device of Karrie Crouse and Will Joines’ Hold Your Breath attempts to blend psychological horror rooted in the delirium one experiences while living in the Dust Bowl with a spiritual undertone. Many inhabitants of the small Oklahoman town Margaret Bellum (Sarah Paulson) live in have a close connection to their Church and a higher power, thinking He is watching and will set things right. The current setting cannot be grimmer: there’s no food, resources are scarce, and the dust makes people violently ill. One can only turn to divinity when faced with such adversity.
But Margaret herself does not believe in any form of higher power. She respects the ones that do, but thinks reality is the best course of action to get them out of the mess they are in. However, as the wind gets stronger, creating large bowls of dust, she slowly begins to think a mysterious figure known as ‘The Gray Man’ (not to be confused with the Russo Brothers movie of the same name) is stalking their family and threatening them while they sleep, moving inside the dust cloud unnoticed. Immediately, there’s a push-pull between a more conservative town who pray for hope and miracles, while the protagonist cannot believe in either because a scary tale she thought was false could be accurate, and no miracles can occur when the living manifestation of The Devil himself haunts you.
That sounds like a tantalizing set-up for a terrific horror movie, exacerbated by jump-cuts that discern whether or not what you’re seeing is real or a fabric of Margaret’s imagination as she tries to survive this harrowing event with her two children, Rose (Amiah Miller), and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins). Unfortunately, that’s about as far as Crouse and Joines go with their movie, lacking a severe sense of identity at every turn in exploring the central idea that makes this 94-minute proposition somewhat attractive.
At some point, Ebon-Moss Bachrach appears like a vampire crawling out of its coffin (the film’s most potent image) as Wallace Grady, a preacher who introduces himself as someone who can heal the conditions that have plagued this town, such as crippling pneumonia caused by its incessant dust, or Rose’s constant nosebleeds. The air is dry, and the medical resources are sparse. In fact, the town’s doctor seemingly makes a quick buck by selling respirator masks and doesn’t provide further advice on how to manage living inside a house infected by fine sawdust-like particles, which slowly destroy the lungs and airways.
Margaret reluctantly accepts, but it’s clear Wallace shouldn’t be trusted. His Orlok-like intro is enough to send a massive chill down our spine, and the movie looks to posit itself as a Dust Bowl Night of the Hunter. Moss-Bachrach’s portrayal of the character is very much Robert Mitchum-coded, but Crouse and Joines go nowhere with the character, who disappears in an incredibly anticlimactic way and never returns, apart from sparsely appearing in some of Margaret’s hallucinations.
And yet, he was the best part of the movie. A clichéd presence, sure, but an intriguing character that blends religious fanaticism (an almost-perverted connection to God) with dark magic. The heightened reality never gets explained and is automatically accepted by the protagonists. This makes this world not rooted in the realism that most Dust Bowl dramas will be steeped in, even if Zoë White’s photography gives texture to its dust and endless fields of wheat. It’s slightly spiritual in its exploration of myth and the belief in religion by way of Wallace, who represents a depraved figure who used religion as a way to tap into people’s beliefs before he corrupts – and kills – them.
These ideas are intriguingly presented but never developed, with an increasing incuriosity plaguing its brisk runtime. Instead of picking one lane and sticking with a central narrative arc, Crouse and Joines scatter the runtime with thematic storytelling to prevent handholding. This is fine, but never give the characters the agency they deserve to make this aesthetic approach interesting. The frequent cuts from Margaret’s dreams to realities don’t feel revelatory but are always jarring and hamper the pace that some of its more atmospheric-driven scenes introduce to the picture. In fact, they don’t feel natural at all and continuously stilt the pace of its storytelling.
There’s always a degree of doubt a filmmaker has to linger with the audience when it comes to keeping the audience guessing if the scene they’re watching is real or not, or perhaps the whole movie. Unfortunately, the directorial duo, with editor Luke Ciarrocchi, constantly tells us what’s real and what isn’t, thus removing the mystery shrouded in the presence of ‘The Gray Man,’ which sadly goes nowhere. Even with a committed performance by Paulson (who screams her guts out in some of the film’s most potent transitions), it’s hard to latch onto the story when Crouse and Joines have difficulty choosing which narrative (or thematic) underpinning they should focus on.
It’s almost as if they’re throwing everything at a wall and seeing what sticks, hoping that one idea will grab the audience’s attention. But when none of its thematic beats pay off meaningfully, it’s hard to care about anything occurring in Hold Your Breath, even if the images are constantly shocking, and its religious undertones plant the seeds for a spiritually twisted tale. But when the movie reaches an unfortunately ridiculous ending with a half-baked M. Night Shyamalan plot twist worthy of The Happening, it sadly loses what its introductory scene set out to draw and turns into another run-of-the-mill psychological horror film with zero thrills and a stance on what it wanted to say. It then becomes clear that the movie had nothing of interest to say and wasted our precious time, leading to a predictable and unfulfilling conclusion.
Hold Your Breath is now available to stream on Hulu and on Disney+.
About Post Author
Maxance Vincent
Maxance Vincent is a freelance film and TV critic, and a recent graduate of a BFA in Film Studies at the Université de Montréal, with a specialization in Video Game Studies. He is now currently enrolled in a graduate diploma in Journalism.
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