Oklahoma, 1933.  With her husband out east building bridges, Margaret Bellum (Sarah Paulson) is left behind at the homestead, looking after their two young children, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins).  When the dust storms do not force the community inside, they must all be alert as fever is creeping its way through, already having taken the oldest Bellum girl and leaving Margaret with unshakable grief.  Left their devices, the two remaining children spend their time engrossed in a book of stories, and they take particular interest in one story surrounding a Grey Man who is said to travel in the dust to stalk his victims.  When a traveling preacher, Wallace Grady (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), comes to the small town, the haunting story begins to feel all too real. 

Karrie Crouse and Will Joines direct Hold Your Breath for Twentieth Century Studios from a script penned by Crouse.  Having gone through a long production process, the film’s Covid roots are noticeable beyond just the theme of illness and masks, but the small cast and the unfortunate straight-to-streaming release also harken back to that time when cinemas were shuttered and streaming was king.  Attendees at the Toronto International Film Festival were able to see the 94-minute, psychological thriller as part of the festival’s Special Presentations which whipped up some buzz around Paulson’s leading turn, but general audiences have to settle to catch this title on Hulu. 

Not quite a Western, not quite a horror, Hold Your Breath has plenty of elements to please fans of both genres, but not enough to really define itself either way.  Paulson, however, is the magnet of the film bringing in an audience and keeping them invested.  It is always a delight to see her working outside of the exploitative universe of Ryan Murphy, but Crouse does not give Margaret quite enough to do to elevate this beyond a straight-to-streaming release.  It is a shame because Paulson does have a knack for horror and thriller, and it would be so nice to see her get to stretch beyond the same derivative pop senilities of Murphy and actually bring a nuanced and conflicted character to the screen.  Having lost a daughter already, the tragedy has spun Margaret into a bout of insomnia and depression that is not glorified as some quirky trait as it would have been on the Nth season of a tired FX anthology series, but Crouse really builds up sympathy between Margaret and the audience and it does seem as if she wants to explore the still-primitive understanding of medicine and depression at the time, especially towards women patients.  Ultimately, the script reveals that it is much more preoccupied with genre instead of drama, but its expert sense of place and a few strong scenes do show a lot of intention that gets spread thin over a broader narrative.  Especially in the latter half of the film, the dust bowl begins to more fully take the place of the squeaking doors and creaky floorboards of any haunted estate turning the wide-open West into a terrifyingly isolating environment, and envelopes the film and these characters with a true sense of harrowing dread.   

This is all aided by Zoë White’s conscious decision not to romanticize the falling of dust through whatever cracks of sunlight come through the slats of Chilly Nathan’s sparsely decorated homesteads. The golden hues are reserved for the oil lamps – flickering beacons in the growing darkness – and the color palette of the film is overflowing with grey, black, and brown. Despite its coloring, it is never a particularly drab film to look at as its visual appeal is boosted by Luke Ciarrocchi’s assembly of White’s footage, employing interesting moments to cut to and hold on insert shots or extreme close-ups on Paulson in distress. The film does not always exploit its setting as well as one might expect, but Hold Your Breath is not simply just a Western and so it makes sense that the camera does not stray too far from the home and this story is far more interior than the expansionst narratives that would have followed these characters’ grandparents in Cinemascope on their journey West.

Though much of the narrative frames the story as a paranoia thriller, the final act does reveal Grady to be a much more malevolent being.  That he does turn out to be a monster does soften the blow as in this place, in this time, in this scenario, the scariest thing really is what the mind conjures up under the stress of holding together a family and surviving the brutal and isolating conditions of the dust bowl, but Moss-Bachrach gives his all to the performance to make sure he is a hunting and formidable foe.  Crouse on the page, though, seemed to not have as much trust in the eventual performer or her audience as she should have because she overworks the tangentially haunting aspects in favor of keeping the film more grounded and therefore more powerful.  The more we know, the less suspense there is, and while the story of The Grey Man and the parallels drawn between Grady’s arrival are very clearly telegraphed from the start, there is always that lingering idea of what if this is all coincidence in the middle act where our questioning suspicion is at an all-time fury.   

It comes to a head right around the center point when a letter arrives for the family from the husband detailing his encounter with a strange drifter claiming to be a preacher who stole his jacket and made his way West.  From there, Margaret topples into wild delusions and the film takes a sharp turn into ambiguity; notably, here, different from suspense.  The filmmaking begins to play tricks on the audience that help place us in the fracturing mind of Margaret, and while it is well done, Crouse leaves the narrative too wide open in the end to be satisfying.  It is okay not to spell everything out explicitly, but it is as if our road map through the story has faded beyond legibility so that we become lost in the dust storm and consequently wander off of the path that Crouse has set us out upon.  This means that we potentially end up at two different conclusions by the time the film ends and the clues we have amassed do not add up the way they were intended by Crouse on the page.  It makes the ending feel loose and almost a little sloppy which does not fit with the otherwise taught craftmanship we have seen on screen. 

Hold Your Breath is a handsomely and competently made film that feels like through some machination of its long production resulting in various re-casts, and studio involvement, lost its ultimate vision by the time it hit the streamer; a release pattern which is already a disservice to the film despite its increased accessibility.  It is not as personal of a story as it initially presents itself and while it does delve deep enough into Margaret that we want to understand her better, it never quite puts her wholly under the lens.  Conjuring up memories of Robert Mitchum’s turn as Preacher Harry Powell in Charles Laughton’s beloved The Night of the Hunter (1955) with notes of Don Siegel’s The Beguiled (1971) of a dangerous stranger infiltrating a home, for much of its runtime, Hold Your Breath is a successful thriller about the darker sides of human nature and how the unforgiving environment can become a breeding ground for unthinkable sin.  Separating what is human and what is a monster ends up weakening the thesis of the narrative because sometimes, the scariest things people will do are in an effort to survive and protect the ones they love.