Set during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, fiercely protective mother Margaret Bellum (Sarah Paulson) goes to extreme lengths to protect her children from paranoia and illness in recluse Oklahoma.
For me, the obvious main hook Hold Your Breath with is relating elements from the 2020 COVID lockdown through the dust bowl – the circumstances of survival to be careful what you breathe to avoid illness, or death, and Bellum taking extra precautions to survive. And, it also tries to branch out with sinister lore of a Grey Man who will make the characters do inexplicable things for breathing in too much of him (too much dust) and contrasts that with a lowly stranger (The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach) who claims to be a healer. Haunted by her own past and watching more lives getting claimed around her, the desperation, the grey man, and the increasing unreliability of Paulson's point of view runs nicely side by side, morphing and transforming into one another until you can't really tell what is real and what isn't....
The movie is packed to the gills playing tricks on the mind with the script, production design, editing, and cinematography - even if all of those things are great. With any other actor, the characters and performances would've buckled under the weight of so many things going on at once. But, Paulson is more than a veteran at this point in horror, and she always makes her performances refreshing and new. I really felt like you could feel the weight of her character, even as the story veers more and more out of control. She, and the rest of the cast, have good chemistry, and if you've had toxic parents who will literally do anything to keep you by their side and untrusting of yourself/the world around you, the setting could potentially intensify the movie watching experience on the emotional side too.
There is a lot of build-up to the ending that you can see how the plot lands where it needs to. Directors Karrie Crouse and Will Joines tackle both the psychological aspect of horror, and use an amazing amount of practical effects to back it up. The level of detail recreating the era - not sure if it was intentional or not - with obvious inspiration from iconic photos from that era (most memorably, Dorothea Lange's work with Migrant Mother) with the cinematography and coloring was very impressive. There's very subtle nods to other depression era work here like Night of the Hunter that's enjoyable too. The production side is crazy but fun to enjoy if watching from its streaming service home on Hulu.
But where the film has some issues is where it needs to be able to breathe (no pun intended), and where it needs to have some control. For the latter, the technical elements behind the screen struggles to rightly fulfill the running time. Even for a slim movie for only 90 minutes long, the pacing feels too and far between to balance all of the story’s conflicts – is the Grey Man real, is Bellum experiencing delusions, are close contacts to the family losing their minds from the severity of their losses and how do they compare or fit in with Bellum's version of events. Like similar horror movies relying on an unreliable narrator, either in character or atmosphere, there is a certain level of trust or suspension of disbelief that leaves audiences to question what is real or not; it's what keeps you hooked until the end where you will be shocked or disappointed by the twist, or leave you questioning everything for the rest of your life. Some movies, like Hold Your Breath pushes that act of trust so much that it all starts to feel a little too far-fetched too early, and that's usually because the movie is hammering home that unreliability way too much. I think that's ultimately what ends up happening here - once the second to third act hits, there's a turning point where I stopped feeling like a sleuth trying to figure out how everything adds up, and more like a helpless voyeur waiting for the suffering to end.
Personally, I felt like the pay-off is worth it even if much of the movie feels a little far-fetched; especially as it starts eyeing themes on ending generational trauma - it just takes a little more patience and again room to breathe to get there. But, it's also worth acknowledging that as much unity as the psychological and physical horror tries to have and succeeds in a lot of areas, there can be too much of a good thing that causes it to buckle - sometimes there is not strength in numbers no matter if that is correlating settings, themes, jump scares, macguffins, or cousins ;)
Rating: ★★★1/2☆☆
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