Hold Your Breath (2024)

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☆☆

Kid 90 (2021)

We don’t often learn of the opportunities and difficulties juvenile actors face until headlines show it or history becomes etched in memoirs. A rare chance to star in their own show or become a heartthrob leaves so many kids who love entertain discovering the risks and the realities of the industry before they're prepared to live in front of the spotlight. Kid 90, directed by Soleil Moon Free, brings us closer to taking a look behind-the-scenes and a generation of stars who learned to navigate the pitfalls of fame.

As a teenager in the 90s, actress and director Soleil Moon Frye carried around a video camera everywhere she went and saved diaries, journals, and voice mail messages. After locking away the footage for almost 20 years, she revisits her childhood as a teenage star and presents an unprecedented time capsule of growing up in Hollywood and New York City.

From her early days of starting out as Punky Brewster to nabbing smaller roles in B-horror movies, Frye shows us life through her eyes. Though she had a normal upbringing at home with a loving mother, busy father, and supportive brother, her life in front of the camera took a turn as she became a teen with a developing body, trying drugs, and gaining more independence. As a young woman growing up in Hollywood, Frye highlights her experiences of bullying and being sexualized at 15, the painful reconciliation of losing friends to suicide, surviving sexual assault, and finding creative freedom. Her footage also captures the joys to everyday activities like getting breakfast, going to parties, and asking her friends of their philosophy about life. Joining her along for the ride are fellow stars from the 90s - Stephen Dorff - Brian Austin Green, David Arquette, Heather McComb and more – who provide their perspective – rejections from auditions, seeing their names splashed in the tabloids, enduring unwarranted backlash, and facing failure.

Frye's choice of a chronological format is easy enough to follow as she takes us from her rise of stardom until her late teens. Picking up a camera was Frye’s way to control everything – being unloved and loving others, her career fading away, relationships coming to an end, losing friends to suicide; and in some ways this is still true for Frye today. As both subject and director, she's able to explore her memories and assess what is appropriate to share and what is okay to keep close to her. At the same time, the documentary struggles with a stronger cohesive structure. As much as Frye does share, the compilation of footage and interviews often only underscore the possibility that there are layers more to discover. Insight by longtime friend and co-star Brian Austin Green recalling the first time he encountered failure when he broke out on his own to release a rap album, and the backlash he faced, is very few and far between. What you're left to grapple with as a viewer is the openness that Frye has about her life and a familiar awareness of the all-too-common reasons that many are led to suicide driven by mental health and/or substance abuse issues. The conversation between her and other Generation Xers about the impact of being a teen star transitioning into stars but it's not as comprehensive as it could've been. 

Part walk down memory lane, part documentary, Frye challenges the assumptions we make about our memories – if they are real or if they are stories we want to tell ourselves. From the outside, the trials and tribulations of teen stars might not seem relatable. But underneath the notoriety, Kid 90 explores there’s more beneath the façade of stardom and celebrity culture. Even in our own lives, reflecting of who we once were can help us understand who we are today and how far we've come.

Rating: ★★☆

Note: I was provided with a screener for review. Kid 90 will be available on March 12th Hulu.