Hold Your Breath (now streaming on Hulu) finds Sarah Paulson battling a miserable case of DUST… MADNESS. The debut feature of directors Karrie Crouse and William Joines (from a script by Crouse, a former Westworld staff writer) drops the American Horror Story star in the middle of a crippling Oklahoma drought, prompting us to wonder if the omnipresent dust clouds are actually there, or a constantly roiling metaphor for mental illness. Either way, it’s another entry in a similarly constantly roiling storm of spooky-season freakouts – now let’s see if it stands out.
The Gist: Margaret (Paulson) hasn’t been sleeping well. She has nightmares of being in the middle of a desert sandstorm, screaming for her lost child – and then she wakes up, gasping. That’s not far at all from reality: She and her two daughters, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins) live in the Oklahoma panhandle. It’s 1933. The third daughter is in a nearby grave on their far-beyond-arid land. The cow is starving and their husband/father is gone, headed east in search of work. The wind is whipping and the dust blasts through the cracks of the house and settles everywhere in thick layers and breathing it in is a misery. Margaret prays for some relief from the grief and the drought, but one gets the sense that she’s questioning her faith and losing her faith and wondering if she’ll ever regain her faith. Good lord, life here is bleak.
She constantly dusts, dusts, dusts. When she sweeps, the broom drags over the floorboards with loud, exaggerated whisking noises: WHISCH WHISCH WHISCH. She takes a pill nightly to help her sleep; there’s vague reference made to something she did once while sleepwalking, and there’s a massive hole in the wall that looks like it’s been mercilessly Hulk’d. The girls wrap damp cloths around their noses and mouths and Margaret treks them up to visit her sister Esther (Annaleigh Ashford), whose son wheezes and coughs and coughs and wheezes and the doctor says it’s from the constantly blowing dust. Then they trek to the church where Margaret sits, cross stitching with other women who judge and gossip. One wonders what they say about Margaret when she’s not around. But what they do say when she is around has to do with a drifter who broke into a local home and murdered a family, which seems all too plausible when it’s just a mother and children home by themselves, without their traditional male protector to point a gun at any intruders.
Before you wonder if this could get any worse, rest assured, the situation is worse: Rose and Ollie have a book and in it is the story of the Grey Man, a mythical malevolence who blows in and out of homes, manifesting from the dust. There’s nothing like a supernatural figment to cast a shadow atop a pall, is there? Now, Margaret is resourceful, to the point of being fearful. Paranoid, though? Not yet, but she’ll get there, don’t worry. She carries the shotgun around here. One night a particularly nasty dust storm forces her and the girls to batten down the hatches and hunker down inside. The girls ask their mother to tell them about the wheat, a dream of wheat, you might say, of a time when the air was clear and the sun was crisp and the land sprouted with wheat, fields and fields of wheat. And then they wonder if someone is in the barn. The Grey Man? Should anyone jump to that conclusion? Well, the someone is Wallace Grady (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who claims to be a preacher who can heal people with his touch. It sure seems like Margaret shouldn’t cease pointing the shotgun at him, but I doubt buckshot would hurt a supernatural figment anyway.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Hold Your Breath has some Babadookian vibes crossed with period folk-horror a la The Witch.
Performance Worth Watching: Has Paulson ever not brought bucketloads of intensity to her roles?
Memorable Dialogue: Margaret’s most pained prayer: “Help me to see the gifts you’ve given me rather than the things you’ve taken away.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Yes, Hold Your Breath is another grief-and-loss trauma movie, albeit a reasonably fresh one, in a setting that allows Crouse to layer metaphors atop metaphors: a rope, used to walk into a dust storm without losing sight of the house, as umbilical cord; the storms as paranoia flare-ups; the Grey Man as fear itself. The film is almost too thematically dense, addressing mental illness, religious faith, the challenges of single motherhood (and inversely, the challenges children face when their lone parent is psychologically unstable) and the idea that the world is cold and hard and cruel and maintaining any level of trust or hope is nigh-impossible.
Which is to say the film is relentless, a tightly packed 94 minutes that barely ever pauses for a moment of peace. Crouse and Joines render it a tireless audio/visual exercise, with rich sound design and haunting visual compositions. As Margaret’s sanity slips, the directors employ an is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex tone and aesthetic, indulging disorienting dream logic and making it difficult to discern the protagonist’s point-of-view as reality or hallucination. Highly effective and disturbing snatches of body-horror self-mutilation are a highlight for you horror sickos, but by that token, major flaws in plot logic bring us out of the hypnotic state Crouse and Joines attempt to nurture (you may find yourself shouting just pull the damn trigger! at the screen during key moments). There are moments when you’ll be involuntarily following the directive dictated by the title, which very well may be the point.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Hold Your Breath blends the stuff of paranoid thrillers, supernatural horror and domestic drama into a reasonably effective mashup. And thank Paulson for giving it her all – as ever! – and elevating it to more than the sum of its parts.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.