In the 1933 Oklahoma Panhandle, there’s no escaping the dust, which creeps through every crevice to coat floors, tables, countertops, and the pillows upon which mothers and children lay their heads. It’s an environmental scourge of biblical proportions, and constant sweeping and abundant insulation do little to stop it from encasing everything in a fine film. Even lungs aren’t immune from this plague, and though masks are a help, they’re incapable of staving off coughing and the scarlet fever that inevitably follows, dooming all to a fatally arid fate.
Hold Your Breath, which premieres on Hulu Oct. 3, immerses itself in this barren landscape, finding pioneers struggling to survive with minimal water, fewer crops, and almost no male protection. Margaret (Sarah Paulson) is one of those individuals, having been left to care for her daughters Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins) without the assistance of her husband, who’s recently departed with others for a job building a bridge that they hope will provide enough money to alleviate their burden. No matter the direness of their situation, Margaret doesn’t truly want to escape, since that would mean leaving her deceased daughter Ava, whose grave she tends to with a diligence only matched by the meticulousness of her housekeeping.
Margaret takes sleeping pills each night to soothe her nerves, but they’re not enough to dispel her recurring nightmare about a game of hide-and-seek with her brood amidst tall abundant wheat that’s interrupted by a blinding dust storm.
Directors Karrie Crouse and Will Joines’ feature debut repeatedly returns to that reverie until it begins to take on the quality of both a memory and a premonition, and its ominousness hangs over these creepy proceedings, whose suitably anxious mood makes up for a lack of jolting frights, and whose lead turn by Paulson is a thing of beautifully unhinged mania. As a mother attempting to hold onto the little she has left (including her sanity), the actress delivers a terrific performance of maternal protectiveness and paranoia run amok, her every tremulous facial reaction a study in grief, angst, and hysteria.
Amiah Miller in Hold Your Breath
Searchlight Pictures
Despite being beset by hardship (including Ollie’s deafness), Margaret and her offspring make the best of their circumstances by adhering to ritual—such as Rose locking herself and her sister in their bedroom at night, for safekeeping—and by leaning on their few neighbors, including Margaret’s sister Esther (Annaleigh Ashford), who has three sons, the youngest of whom soon starts hacking in a fashion that portends grave trouble.
When not tidying up her modest abode, Margaret milks the family’s cow (their single source of sustenance) and does needlepoint with the rest of the area’s women, who sit around sharing whatever gossip exists in this empty milieu. It’s at one of these meetings that Margaret hears about a nearby clan who were murdered by a drifter who vanished without a trace. While Margaret is naturally concerned by such news, she doesn’t immediately relate this crime to a bedtime story that Rose reads Ollie about “The Grey Man,” a specter who can possess the living by transforming into dust and getting inhaled by his prey.
Hold Your Breath swiftly establishes both its rugged setting and its malevolent atmosphere via compositions that suggest peril without calling undue attention to themselves. Crouse and Joines’ efficient, pointed stewardship features not a wasted gesture, and their script (credited solely to Crouse) ups the ante when Margaret, having previously ignored Ollie’s claim that she’d spotted a man outside their house, discovers a stranger hiding in the loft of their barn.
This figure is Wallace (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who’s in possession of Margaret’s husband’s jacket and letter home, and who identifies himself as a preacher sent to check on them in their patriarch’s absence. Moreover, he claims to have the ”healing touch.” Shotgun at the ready, Margaret is intensely skeptical of this man. Yet when he magically stops Rose’s nose from bleeding, she’s persuaded to think he might be telling the truth, and allows him to stay in the barn, out of sight from her nosy neighbors.
Hold Your Breath teases Wallace’s true intentions for most of its middle section, and Moss-Bachrach aids that cause by exuding just the right mixture of kindness and shadiness. At the same time that she’s sheltering this supposed man of the cloth, Margaret is forced to contend with a tragedy involving Esther and her boys which illustrates that madness also resides on these plains.
Paulson’s mom sees to Esther with pity and resolve, even as it becomes clear that she too is vulnerable to psychological threats. It’s not long before the boundaries between the real and the unreal slowly begin to blur, with Margaret unsure of whether she’s awake or asleep, and if Wallace is a pious savior, a shady trickster, or the Grey Man himself, capable of infiltrating their home by evaporating and materializing at will.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach in Hold Your Breath
Searchlight Pictures
While there are merely a few possible outcomes to Hold Your Breath, Crouse and Joines stage their action dynamically, highlighted by a late, chilling confrontation between Margaret and Wallace that isn’t what it initially seems to be. The directors swaddle their protagonists in shadows and dust, the latter of which glistens lightly in the air, and Paulson evokes Margaret’s panic, fury, and mounting insanity (or is it?) with a deftness that amplifies the material’s edginess. Paulson communicates as much through harried eyes and twitchy expressions as through shaky words, and she often transforms the film into a one-woman showcase, regardless of the fact that her co-stars—especially Miller—provide sturdy support.
In the end, Hold Your Breath isn’t more than a modest B-movie elevated by its superb leading lady, and yet that’s part of its pleasure. Stripped down and suspenseful, Crouse and Joines’ compact 94-minute thriller builds unease at a methodical pace and doesn’t tip its hand until its finale, which delivers the very chaos it’s been promising from the start. In a genre overly taken as of late with “elevated” trauma scares, its gritty, skillful menace is a breath of fresh air.
