Sarah Paulson Shines in Scattered Horror

The confines of gothic horror meet the sprawling American Dust Bowl in “Hold Your Breath,” the feature debut of directing duo Karrie Crouse and Will Joines. The film often does too much, reaching for too many different sources for its attempted thrills and chills, which results in a mostly scattered experience. However, it has a couple of notable strengths. The first is its handful of tense moments. The second is its sense of paranoia surrounding sickness, in ways that mirror the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Both of these eventually fade, but what remains consistent through its runtime is its committed lead performance from Sarah Paulson, who proves once again that horror would be poorer without her. A mere three-year absence from the genre feels too long, even if she deserves a stronger comeback.  

The year is 1933, at a time when the Oklahoma panhandle was subject to severe, debilitating dust storms. With her husband away building bridges out of state, Margaret (Paulson) is left to look after her two daughters, teenager Rose (Amiah Miller) and adolescent Ollie (stellar Deaf-mute actress Alona Jane Robbins), not long after her third daughter succumbed to a sickness. Death lingers in the air like spores. This feeling permeates every frame thanks to the film’s sickly, desaturated palette. Each scene leaves Margaret worried about the dust that not only settles on every surface, but floats through the air, sneaking into her home through minor cracks. Crouse and Joines frequently cut to POV shots of light shimmering off these tiny (though still entirely visible) bits of debris, before using Paulson’s paranoid expression to build lingering unease in quiet moments.

However, “Hold Your Breath” is also a noisy film, and while its loudest moments wouldn’t work without the contrast of the aforementioned silence, it relies too much on sudden bursts of sound to unsettle. The first few times Margaret’s dreams of greenery are interrupted by sudden storms — accompanied by both Paulson’s screams and the screams of the wind — it proves surprising. However, it’s a trick on which the film relies time after time, to the point of becoming mechanical. After a while, the result isn’t so much scary or unsettling as it is irritating and predictable.

As the film establishes its scant rural community and their little safety rituals — like tying twine ropes to their doors so they can find their way back home during blinding storms — Margaret’s daughters also become invested in a storybook. This horror fable tells of a shadowy figure, the Grey Man, who seeps into people’s homes like dust and makes them do terrible things. All the while, hints come to the fore about Margaret’s health in the wake of her daughter’s death a few year’s prior. She now takes pills to curb her sleepwalking and some dangerous behavior.

It isn’t hard to put two and two together about what fears the Grey Man represents for Margaret (the film induces distinctly modern discomfort surrounding ailments in the air, with characters wearing masks for safety) or what Margaret’s role in the film will end up being, given her past. However, numerous detours ensure that the story spins its wheels for extended periods before letting Paulson dive headfirst into its most enjoyably shlocky territory. She’s a treat to watch, even when the rest of the movie isn’t.

To add to the existing drama, rumors of a local drifter and murderer dovetail with the arrival of a stranger at Margaret’s home (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a preacher who claims to know her husband, and who also appears to have supernatural powers. Moss-Bachrach walks a fine line between comfort and suspicion, bolstered by the girls’ fears over their bedtime story (could this be the Grey Man in human form?), but this subplot feels awkwardly wedged into “Hold Your Breath” from an entirely different movie. Things move quickly from one premise to the next, and yet, too little happens along the way, despite this swift unveiling.

The film does eventually find its way back to its central tale of a grieving mother struggling to protect her kids from an unforgiving world — and from herself. However, by the time it unleashes its most terrifying ideas (which happen to be its most intimate), it hasn’t picked up nearly enough windspeed for them to land with the thundering force they ought to.