Maybe it’s just me, but in 2024’s horror films, the theme of COVID seems to have exploded. Yes, stories tracing elements of solitude have always existed, but after 2020 forced people to go on lockdown, the idea of going crazy about something evil that is outside your door has taken a different turn. Definitely so, just after the very much the same premise “Never Let Go” Hulu has launched another story on the verge of being a “mad mommy in Karrie Crouse and Will Joines ‘Hold Your Breath’ who’s holding her breath.” It opens with a promising performance from Sarah Paulson of course. But Hold Your Breath is frustrating. It contains some great scenes after inferior scenes, but in the end, they fail to build a story worth investing in. It is a film full of scenes but without movements.
The plot of the movie “Hold Your Breath” centers around Walter and Margaret Bellum during the ‘dust storm’ era of Oklahoma in 1933. Margaret has just two kids, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), as her husband has gone away for work. When the children are too young to survive, a fifty-year-old man approaches them, claiming that there is a risk in a dust storm that can drive people into chaos and carry out unspeakable actions. This mythical being, known as the Gray Man, has been absent after all the children’s stories about him being in the dust. As in the rest of the United States, Margaret has also become a single mother after her husband left for work in the city, working tirelessly to support her children, one of whom is likely to develop an eating disorder.
Margaret goes into a deep mental depression as she has no more hope of seeing her husband again. For the sake of the children, she reads to clairvoyantly optimistically sympathetic people about her wild delusions. However, the parenting styles employed by the peers of the local regions raise more questions than they answer. In an act of violence, the children are really initiated and humiliated and afterward, Margaret goes into a deep introspective state of mind and her circumstances report deep within oppressive darkness that starts suffocating all optimism and hope.
Imagining life as a parent during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s is quite difficult, and there is indeed a more emphasized and subtextual drama concerning the maternal pressure that can drive a woman into biological madness. Here, Paulson is best when she portrays that kind of psychological ambiguity, one that oscillates between the danger being posed to her daughters from outside or from within.
There are notable performances made in “Hold Your Breath” scenes particularly two when a preacher breathes life into the character and is played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach of, The Bear. On his first appearance, he walks out from a barn-like Nosferatu coming out from his coffin. It’s a striking moment in a film that has too few of them. There is then a more dramatic sequence about a dining table that Paulson and Moss-Bachrach get right. Finally, there is a biting moment where Margaret effectively has to be regulated by the locals otherwise they will snatch her children away, this area of tension however has been cut from the final edit but still feels like it could improve the film.
The beats pierced the dust of “Hold Your Breath” but what was the film all about remained buried under the chaos. The film does not rely on the Gray Man or CGI for swirling dust. But they recognize that nothing is scarier than a mother who is about to lose her mind and focus more on their actors than on a grand idea. Because let us be frank – what makes us hold our breath the most is an amazing actress giving the very best of herself.
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