Sparse Hold Your Breath a Windswept Dusty Nightmare of Emotional Paranoia
While her husband is away at a job back east, Margaret Bellum (Sarah Paulson) and her two daughters, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), are working their dying Oklahoma farm. Devastating dust storms are making life miserable, potentially even lethal. But the trio are determined to make the most of what they have, and they will eke things out as best they can until the day their family is reunited.
Things take a scary turn when a stranger, Wallace Grady (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), wearing her husband’s coat is found hiding in Margaret’s barn. He claims he’s a friend and is there to help them keep fighting the good fight against Nature’s malicious onslaught of dirt, dust, and wind. But Margaret isn’t so sure, and soon she’s wondering if Wallace is all he claims to be, including whether or not this man is even human.
With the air nigh unbreathable, the Bellums are put to the ultimate test. Their collective survival is dependent on whether or not they can continue to separate fact from fiction and not let terrifying fantasy get in the way of a hardscrabble reality that’s already dangerous enough without fears born from unspeakable nightmares pugnaciously making themselves corporeal.
Set during the height of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, Hold Your Breath is a psychological shocker that plays out like Emma Tammi’s The Wind, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, and Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others all rolled into one ominously ethereal shell. Directors Karrie Crouse (also the film’s writer) and William Joines have constructed a bleakly sparse Western where true horror is found in the emptiness of living one’s day-to-day life on the isolated extremes, past tragedies fusing with current realities to form an aura of slowly enveloping doom that shows no mercy and assaults all who enter its domain, no exceptions.
While not every facet of Crouse’s screenplay works as well as I would have liked, Paulson makes each piece of this narrative puzzle box resonate all the same. The actor anchors things with a richly complex performance that’s a continual wonder. Her smothering paranoia is born out of unimaginable tragedy and all-too-relatable personal guilt. Margaret has experienced the type of loss no parent ever should. Now she sees danger around every corner and within each speck of dust, and her growing distrust of everyone and everything has begun to fester around her two daughters like a communicable disease.
Paulson jitters her way through events with controlled fury. I loved the way she utilized her arms and hands. Sometimes they are overly fluid, moving this way and that as if they were made of silk and the incessant wind was determined to blow them to the four corners of the expansive Oklahoma nowhere. At other times they were as rigid and as unmovable as a granite statue forged by Medusa, Paulson giving every ounce of herself over to her character in ways that are a continual surprise. She’s magnificent.
Crouse and Joines do a terrific job of fleshing out this empty void of a world, showing how the women of this community form small circles of intimacy to maintain human connections amidst all the miserable nothingness. Small kindnesses go a long way, and while each clique isn’t exactly a judgment-free zone free of acrimony and insinuation, these ladies still know that the only way they will stay sane is if they do it together.
As wonderful as all of this is, I did have issues with the film’s second half. The mystery surrounding Grady left me cold. I didn’t think the uncertainty revolving around his identity (and whether or not he was even human) was as big a question mark as it was intended to be. The twists involving him, and by extension Margaret’s perception of who he is and what he wants with her and the children, didn’t matter because I saw right through them far too quickly.
Even so, Hold Your Breath won me over. While I wasn’t stunned by anything that transpired, Paulson and Miller (who many may remember as Nova from 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes, now all grown up and making a massive impression here) hit one upsetting emotional note after another during the film’s hushed climax. It’s as if the land they live on is aching for blood. If they don’t make a sacrifice, it will take theirs in its stead, ultimately wiping the Bellum women off the face of the Earth as if they never even existed in the first place.
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
