HOLD YOUR BREATH (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Hold Your Breath, Searchlight Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 2, 2024

As a study of isolation and despair, Hold Your Breath probably doesn't need its horror elements. They're here, though, in the debut feature of the directing team of Karrie Crouse and William Joines, who do what they can with the possibilities of a supernatural presence or a deteriorating psyche amidst a backdrop that feels frightening enough on its own.

The setting is the Oklahoma panhandle, circa 1933, when the entire country, as well as the world, was suffering from a severe economic downturn. At the same time, this part of the United States had its own unique problems, in the forms of a years-long drought and the resulting dust storms that would eventually turn the plains of the middle of the country into a desert. The combination of economic uncertainty and natural disasters resulted in mass migration, but for those who couldn't or wouldn't leave, famine, illness, and death awaited.

Crouse's screenplay focuses on those concerns in its first act or so, as the movie follows a family of three, currently stuck in this hostile environment for a number of reasons. Firstly, Margaret Bellum (Sarah Paulson, a commanding presence, even if the character is uneasily developed by the script) simply doesn't have the money to afford a trip to another part of the country with her two daughters Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), who is hard of hearing. Her husband, the girls' father, has moved east, taking a construction job and trying to earn enough to support his family in a new location, but the process is slow.

The other major reason is that Margaret doesn't want to leave the farm where the three live, because it is the family's home and, without anyone there to tend to it, could easily be lost to the storms, the bank, or a drifter who decides to occupy an abandoned shelter. Plus, Margaret doesn't want to leave her third child, who's currently buried in the yard next to a tree after dying from an illness caused by all the dust in the air.

This section of the story is filled with dread, observing as the family travels by foot to visit the local church, where Margaret participates in a regular and gossipy sewing circle, or her sister-in-law Esther (Annaleigh Ashford), who lives with her two children. The younger child has developed a persistent cough. The doctor says it's pneumonia, but apart from packing up and moving anywhere else, Esther's only option is to keep the house as clear of dust as possible.

That's virtually impossible for her or even Margaret, who has sealed every crack and crevice of the farmhouse with cloth and other materials. It doesn't matter. The dust finds its way inside the house, collecting on every surface over the course of the day and visibly hovering in the air in particles when the sun shines through the shutters or catches the glow of a lantern. Outside, the mother and her daughters cover their faces with wet pieces of cloth, but if one of those dust storms arrives, it's a race to the relative safety of the house, as a wide and towering mass of darkness follows them.

The mood here is imposingly hopeless, simply by way of Crouse and Joines presenting this situation for what it is, these characters as helpless to their extraordinary circumstances, and the harsh realities of the encroaching Dust Bowl on a human scale. Margaret and the girls repeat the same patterns and processes day after day, and nothing changes. The dust keeps gathering. The storms keep coming. Rose's nose starts bleeding, just as the dead daughter did. The farm's cow produces less and less milk, and Margaret cannot escape the same nightmare of losing her surviving children in a sudden swirl of airborne soil.

Crouse eventually takes a turn in the screenplay, as rumors of a murderous drifter spread, odd sounds occur outside the house and in the barn, Ollie becomes certain that a shape-shifting character from a horror story is real and on the farm, and Margaret stops taking her sleeping pills in order to guard her family through the night. Are these noises and visions real or just in the family's collective, desperate mind?

There are a couple of answers. The big one, of course, is for the finale to reveal, which is to be expected but, considering how grounded most of the story is, isn't much of a surprise, despite the lengthy build-up to it. Another answer arrives in the person of Wallace Grady (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a drifter who knows the family because he worked with Margaret's husband and claims to be a faith healer. There are three options as to his identity: He's legit, a con man, or some supernatural entity. What's strangest about the character, perhaps, is how quickly Wallace exits and how little impact he actually has on the story.

Crouse and Joines are so specific in the details of this period that it is quite odd how broad and uncertain the narrative of Hold Your Breath turns out to be. It all points to a reluctance on the filmmakers' part to fully invest in either a realistic survival tale or a horror story—of either the supernatural or psychological variety. While it may be better as the former, the movie wavers between those modes and, in its hesitation to choose, undermines them both.

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