Trying to tie the supernatural and just some good old-fashioned insanity is a tricky thing. The one film that comes to everyone’s mind is The Shining as Jack Nickelson’s Jack Torrance going through isolation and madness while in a haunted house seemed to be the perfect blend of supernatural and psychological horror. Directors (and frequent collaborators) Karrie Crouse and Will Joines once again team up to try and gracefully combine the two genres together in their latest film Hold Your Breath, and even enlist American Horror Story vet Sarah Paulson, but the film is somewhat uneven.
Set in the 1930s Oklahoma during a raging dust storm (hence the film’s title), Hold Your Breath follows matriarch Margaret (Sarah Paulson) as she manages her family farm after her husband has recently left in search of some work. She is now managing the family farm and looking after her two children Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins) who are also deaf, while mourning the death of another child. And because this is the 1930s, times are tough. The dust storms are murderous, livestock and crops are dying, oh and there might be a mysterious entity called “The Grey Man” who can travel through the cracks in the wall in the form of the dust that’s haunting them.
While there are a few people in town Margaret is friendly with when she goes into town for sewing circles and gossip, it’s mostly just her and her children. Of course, there’s also the rumor of a murder by a mysterious stranger, and the children read a folk tale of the mysterious entity. It’s almost a natural response to go a little mad, and in Hold Your Breath Sarah Paulson delivers a solid performance of a grieving mother pushed to the brink of her sanity. When things couldn’t get any stranger on the farm, a mysterious preacher who claims he can heal Wallace (Ebon Moss-Bachrach of The Bear fame) comes to the farm. He’s saying all the right things and even claims to cure Rose of her dust-manufactured nosebleeds. Still, his timing and the paranoia of the mysterious boogeyman is driving Margaret even closer to the brink.
As stated before, Sarah Paulson rocks the hell out of her role. There’s a reason she’s an Emmy, Tony, SAG, and Critics Choice award winner. The transformation she makes throughout Hold Your Breath is exceptional as she goes from grieving mother to certifiable over the film’s hour-and-a-half runtime. Another standout in Hold Your Breath is Amiah Miller as the twelve-year-old Rose who halfway believes the legend of the Gray Man, but is also seeing there her mother is losing it. She has to bear the weight of not only worrying for her mother, but ensuring the safety for her younger sister. There’s a scene towards the end of the film that displays probably the only big tension in the film as she wrestles with how to take matters into her own hands to keep everyone safe.
However, Hold Your Breath while labeled a psychological horror film doesn’t have many scares. The jump scares are more loud than scary, and the whole notion of the supernatural seems one foot in, one foot out for most of the film. Hold Your Breath might have been more interesting if it took a page from The Shining and decided to incorporate the supernatural elements more into it. Even though Sarah Paulson is terrifying, a shape-shifting monster that can blend into the dust could have been equally scary, if not more. Deciding the bottleneck the film between only a few core characters who (besides Margaret and her eldest daughter) aren’t that interesting. While the CGI for the dust storms is interesting and well done, they still come across as clearly CGI, so the terror of going outside during the height of the Dust Bowl also isn’t as terrifying.
Overall, Hold Your Breath is a valiant attempt at creating tension and displaying how isolation in a secluded place can warp one’s mind. Sarah Paulson as always delivers, but perhaps a revised script could have heightened the tension to help the film enhance the scares.
Hold Your Breath is now playing on Hulu.
