HOLD YOUR BREATH (2024)

Paranoia, claustrophobia, and narrative economy seem to be an unholy trinity that’s all the rage for a multitude of recent horror releases. It’s an effective trend when wielded well, something that stems back from Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), through Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night (2017), and now Karrie Crouse and Will Joines’s Hold Your Breath—all tales of insulated, threatened families descending into madness from the dangers that lie within. But where the former two films dabble exclusively either in the paranormal or the speculative, the lattermost’s initial selling point is the fact that its threat was terrifyingly real, a literal force of nature that swept through Oklahoma through a troubled point of American history; the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Caught in the throes of its catastrophic aridity is the Bellum family—Margaret (Sarah Paulson) and her two daughters, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), who’ve sent their father out of state to build bridges for work, all while freshly grieving the loss of their youngest, Ada. Their everyday life is a struggle to preserve their health; Margaret is neurotically meticulous about keeping every speck of dust sealed and swept out of their house, not helped by how she’s frequently afflicted by nightmares of losing her two surviving daughters in a violent dust storm. The insular Oklahoma village the Bellums live in is similarly troubled by the persistent dust; for one, Esther (Annaleigh Ashford), Margaret’s sister, has a son named Thomas (Nathan Gariety) whose coughing shows no sign of ceasing anytime soon and is only growing coarser by the minute.

And if the towering dust cloud chasing the Bellums at one point early on in the film wasn’t enough to scare them, a folkloric book in Ollie’s possession offers hints of a new menace. A Babadook-esque figure of its own, her book tells the tale of the Grey Man, a once-human being who died ablaze in the dust, and whose ashes now occupy the storm, possessing anyone unsuspecting enough to inhale them. Almost inevitably, then, more events begin to haunt the village. Rumours go around of a drifter who prompted the slaughter of an innocent family, and not long after, Esther’s oldest child, Jacob (Ethan Woodall) dies in a cart accident during a storm—something that ramps up Margaret’s neurotic overprotectiveness of her children even further, all the way up to a line that begins to push at the limits of both her own sanity, and the safety of her family.

As indicated in the aforementioned examples, we’ve seen this kind of movie and the formula it represents before. Even as they each carry different incarnations or threats, expectations are due to naturally follow when the premise of a film once more banks on an enclosed family’s increasing struggles to survive during heightened periods of uncertainty and paranoia, where the true nature of the danger encircling them remains deeply nebulous. The demand that forms, then, is that Hold Your Breath differentiates itself even beyond the scope of its historical setting, as well as its blend of natural disasters and supernatural folklore. But at least for now, and for what it’s worth, the retreading of familiar narrative territory that Hold Your Breath embarks on initially seems cohesive enough to be enjoyable, and jolts its audience every so often with a series of competently deployed tricks and spooks early on.

One of the most pivotal narrative anchors for films like these appears to be parents on a descent into madness, and Sarah Paulson’s magnetic lead performance is riveting enough to provide the film with enough self-sustaining momentum. Perhaps most noteworthy about Paulson’s portrayal of Margaret is just how convincingly she sells her steadfast, headstrong, determined front, which is evidently, persistently hiding a deep sense of trepidation and fear about the safety of her children underneath. A notable demonstration of this front; after Esther loses Jacob, the women of the village gather around her, consoling her with platitudes that the loss is a part of God’s plan, but Margaret immediately rejects that notion in favour of getting the women to start sweeping the dust out of the building, getting them to understand that only they can save themselves from danger and sickness. This is a grief-stricken woman, willing to go to the greatest lengths that not a single speck of dust threatens to take another child from her… but as paranoia and mysterious forces set in, there’s a great amount of entertainment to be gleaned from watching Paulson’s performance measuredly bring out the cracks in Margaret’s fragile façade.

Once those cracks fully set in, however, the film’s narrative direction shatters all over the place, aimlessly shooting for multiple different directions before barely refocusing towards its conclusion. The supernatural elements, alluded to early on by the presence of the Grey Man, are ultimately marred with so much ambiguity and a lack of concrete guidelines that it’s impossible to follow what’s happening with them by the time their influence reaches their peak. A repeated thread of Margaret’s sewing project provides a decent opportunity for her to hear unsettling pieces of gossip from the townsfolk, but never really amounts to much by the time the greater portion of the film’s thrills starts to take hold. Those thrills in question are also quite literally heralded by the arrival of a mysterious preacher named Wallace (The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who claims to know of Margaret’s husband, and seemingly demonstrates his ability to lay hands and heal—a slightly out-of-place presence in this story that only slightly helps the film’s paranoid conceit up until a very specific point.

Long have audiences pondered and bickered over the necessity of ostensibly overbearing runtimes stretching past two-and-a-half hours, citing an unnecessary amount of detail invested in stories that wind up having drawn-out pacing problems by the time they slog to the credits. But there’s also something to be said about films that attempt to do perhaps far too much within the scope of the seemingly more efficient 94-minute runtime, biting off more than they can chew while never allowing themselves the temporal breathing room to meaningfully explore their concepts further. Again, like The Babadook, It Comes at Night, and others before it, the thematic place that Hold Your Breath winds up is considerably bleak and oppressive, but that same darkness can only really land with such an impact when a more measured, focused approach to narrative meaningfully precedes it.

Even with a superb supporting ensemble cast, and even with moments of technical bravado (using cleanly framed cinematography alongside a rattling soundtrack and sound design), the jolts this film creates eventually grow to feel too procedural to leave a lasting impact, the substance behind them only growing more disorienting as the film helplessly juggles multiple ambitions at once. Perhaps it’s encouraging to see a film that wants to accomplish so much with such constraints, and there are moments where the family’s face-to-face encounters with true dread are sincerely effective, but Hold Your Breath frequently gets swept up in its own proverbial duststorm, never truly sure of when the next disorienting, sickening speck of dust will be inhaled that could throw it off of its axis.

USA | 2024 | 94 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

directors: Karrie Crouse & Will Joines.
writer: Karrie Crouse.
starring: Sarah Paulson, Amiah Miller, Annaleigh Ashford, Alona Jane Robbins & Ebon Moss-Bachrach.