2024 | rated R | starring Sarah Paulson, Annaleigh Ashford, Ebon Moss-Bachrach | directed by Karrie Crouse and William Joines | 1h 34m | 3 out of 5 stars |
In the 1930s, amid the Dust Bowl, mother of two Margaret Bellum (Sarah Paulson) starts to question the dangers around her as her sister Esther (Annaleigh Ashford) loses her mind to grief, a mysterious preacher (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) shows up claiming healing powers and her daughter (Amiah Miller) claims the dust is hiding a mysterious demon, the Gray Man, who slips is through the cracks and drives his victims mad.
Full disclosure. Hold Your Breath was one of my most anticipated movies of the year. Back when it was called Dust. We have the powerhouse acting of Paulson and Ashford getting to share the screen together. We’ve also got the setting, a horror movie set in the American Dust Bowl is ripe with untapped potential. If the final product here, from Westworld writers Karrie Crouse and William Joines doesn’t live up to my sky-high expectations, that’s to be expected, but I suspect it might not satisfy the average horror viewer looking for a supernatural tale of impending madness based on it’s own internal logic, what it sets up and where it goes.
This year’s marquee film for Hulu’s Huluween viewing lineup (last year’s was the silent alien invasion novelty flick No One Will Save You), Hold Your Breath features a crackling set up inside a beautiful and claustrophobic period piece. If there is a frontier town at all around the Bellum household it’s a place they have to walk to across a vast ocean of sand with cloths wrapped around their faces to get to. The Covid parallels are plentiful here with the movie having been shot back in 2020. We get a good sense of how barren and dangerous that life was. We see microscopic shots of dust floating through the tiniest cracks in the wood cabins. The dust is inescapable and it’s in everything.
The movie is exceedingly well acted by all involved and that’s the biggest reason to see Hold Your Breath. Paulson is typically astonishing, outdoing years of American Horror Story schlock in a single primal scream of a performance. Annaleigh Ashford continues to deliver character work that makes one wonder why she isn’t more famous. Ashford’s ability to swing from grieving mother to something more sinister with a slow smile is one of the most effective pieces of true horror in the movie. Ebon Moss-Bachrach has one of the stand-out scenes in the film, a dinner-table creep-fest where his true intentions get exposed. The child actors portraying the young Bellum’s (one of which is deaf and mute) are excellent, particularly as they get more prominent in the 3rd act.
The 3rd act, however, is what lets this movie down and it does so in a way that undercuts the rest of it in a big way. Hold Your Breath wants to be both a supernatural demon haunting movie and and a Descent into Madness movie. I like a good puzzle box mystery, but this movie throws so many red herrings out there and leaves us open to so many different, intersecting interpretations that it’s ultimately unsatisfying. Same goes for the thriller elements. Large pieces of information are suddenly dropped on us in the third act at the last minute, including the introduction of a major character, that are quickly dealt with and moved on from. It’s not a problem that there are 4 or 5 ways to interpret the action, but that the movie doesn’t establish a foundation of the world it’s in, all to keep us in Sarah Paulson’s increasingly unhinged head – but to what end?
Is this world supernatural or not? In it do preachers have the ability to heal? If they do, was Esther healed by a preacher or simply believes she was, but Margaret suffer from a mental breakdown that she thinks is supernatural? Given that Margaret and Esther are sisters are they being haunted by the same Gray Man demon or are they genetically predisposed to their fate? The movie seems to be saying both and everything all at once when I think a more satisfying conclusion would have brought up all those ideas, but then picked one and went with it.
I can’t deny I was entertained and technically impressed with the film – and it’s a must see for fans of these 3 leads. But as a story it left me with more questions than answers. The movie gets lost in its own enigma.