The loss of a loved one gives way to full-fledged lunacy in Hold Your Breath, the feature debut from directing duo Karrie Crouse and Will Joines. Set in the Oklahoma panhandle circa 1933, the film depicts the brutal dust storms that ravaged the prairie and threatened the lives of its residents during the Dust Bowl. Elements of psychological, supernatural, and survival horror are incorporated, yet never coalesce into a cohesive story, despite the film boasting a strong central performance and a commitment to historical detail.
Sarah Paulson plays Margaret, a housewife tasked with looking over the family’s desolate farm after her husband decides to find construction work elsewhere. She looks over her daughters Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), a duty that proves increasingly difficult as their cow slowly stops producing milk and dust permeates every corner of their home. Though her eldest, Rose, continuously pleads for them to join their father, Margaret is incapable of leaving. Her third daughter, Ada, previously died of scarlet fever and is buried under the sole gravestone on the property, which Margaret religiously, and futilely, cleanses of sediment with each passing day.
The compounding, constant environmental factors—storms, starvation, sleep deprivation—are taking a psychological toll on Margaret. When Ada passed, she was prescribed a sleep aid in order to quell dangerous sleepwalking fits. Her constant reliance on the pills, as well as her heightened stress levels, have made them less effective, as she violently wakes from sleep most days with a terrifying vision of her girls being suffocated by a dust storm. If she wasn’t already starting to behave erratically, the unexpected arrival of a drifter (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) sets everything completely off-kilter, and Margaret’s defensive instinct actually threatens the safety of those she’s meant to protect.
Originally titled Dust, Crouse’s screenplay appeared on the buzzy Black List back in 2020. It would have been prudent for the film to predominantly focus on the natural devastation of the landscape—and the deteriorating spirit of the souls stuck there—as its former title would suggest. Instead, Hold Your Breath incorporates a metaphysical threat that detracts from the innate terror of this period. The girls clutch a book containing region-specific ghost stories, one of which details an entity called The Gray Man. Made entirely of dust, those who inhale even a single particle of him are forced to “do terrible things.” Naturally, this nightmare manages to manifest itself in their waking hours.
The production design, undertaken by Tim Grimes, brings a Gothic elevation to sets that, otherwise, feel ripped from the ‘00s animated children’s show Courage The Cowardly Dog. The farmhouse is appropriately barebones, as is the adjoining barn that houses the heifer (and, during one of the film’s most tense scenes, something far more sinister). Above all, the sets are diligently soiled, particularly as sweeping proves utterly ineffective and dust begins to gradually coat every single household object. The mania induced by this Sisyphean chore affects both Margaret and her sister, Esther (Broadway talent Annaleigh Ashford), though the crushing weight of keeping up with domestic or otherwise “womanly” tasks amid disaster isn’t adequately explored.
Unsurprisingly, Paulson’s performance is the highlight of Hold Your Breath, descending into a familiar form of frenzied madness that has served the actress—and her projects—incredibly well across the horror realm (Run, American Horror Story, Ratched). Moss-Bachrach is also exemplary, with an obvious touchstone for his character being Robert Mitchum’s menacing preacher in The Night Of The Hunter. Normally, mining from such a stellar performance would position the actor at a disadvantage, but most of the film’s best scenes are owed to his and Paulson’s ability to feed off of each other’s baleful energy. Young actors Miller and Robbins are also strong, with the former taking on the responsibility of parsing fact from fantasy amid her mother’s worsening psychological state.
Yet, for all of the horror subgenres crammed into Hold Your Breath, it never conjures sufficient scares. It attempts to strike fear by simply cranking up the sound mix during dust storm sequences, which is initially jarring until it’s merely annoying. There is a great display of mental anguish among the cast, but that doesn’t necessarily steep the film in a state of terror. Particularly when the period-accurate details reflect the pain and suffering that befell an already precarious community—one which would then be persecuted as it sought opportunities elsewhere—it’s hard to swallow the inconsistent and generic “ghost” story being sold on top of it all.
Director: Karrie Crouse, Will Joines
Writer: Karrie Crouse
Starring: Sarah Paulson, Amiah Miller, Annaleigh Ashford, Alona Jane Robbins, Ebon Moss-Bachrach
Release Date: October 3, 2024 (Hulu)