Hold Your Breath

Hold Your Breath is hard to recommend, despite the strong start and Paulson's performance.

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Scott's Self-Indulgent Movie Podcast · Episode 891 Hold Your Breath

There's a lot of historical scenarios that are ripe for a horror movie. If you're in a war zone and experiencing the effects of PTSD you can amplify the horror of war by introducing a supernatural element. Likwise, a lot of modern horror movies have enjoyed taking on patriarcharcical structures via a protagonist stuck in an oppressive situation. But one that has gone almost untouched by American horror filmmakers is...The Dust Bowl. A terrfying era for American farmers in middle America where a combination of bad weather, bad planning, and beyond contributed to literal storms of dusk overtaking small farming communities. A literal biblical plague in real life. But can Hold Your Breath make the most of this promising premise?

The Setup

The film follows Margaret Bellum, a wife and mother reeling from the loss of her youngest daughter and her husband's absence (he's in Chicago for work) in 1930s Oklahoma. While Margaret's meticulous cleaning and routines matain some semblance of order, the punishing dust storms, strangers from out of town and possibly even malevolent forces may push Margaret over the edge.

There's a lot I like in this movie. The performances and premise are really good and the movie's first act and a half are a unique kind of survival horror that I haven't really seen before (outside of Dune maybe). But it's also hard to recommend because the movie abandons a lot of its best ideas to lean on more tried and true genre staples. So first, I'm going to highlight this movie's main appeals and then take some time to explain why the script's back end lets it down.

Solid Element #1: A Suitably Terrifying Time and Place

The key to any psychological horror movie, at least in my mind, is to make our lead character's headspace easy to understand, which means lot of their bad behavior or worst impulses make sense. And this presentation of Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma is soul-crushing.

The dust is everywhere and gets through every crack. Any kind of human connection usually requires walking through a dust storm, where the other women (most of the men are dead after accidents or are looking for work) share terrifying stories about strangers or how the dust is detrimentally impacting their children. So while Margaret is paranoid about dust entering her home. It's an understandable level of paranoia. 

The first half of the movie does a great job of establishing the routine, and also demonstrating just how awful trying to exist amongst the dust is. It is oppressive and terrifying and clearly not good for anyone's mental health to stick around.

Solid Element #2: Sarah Paulson's Performance

Sarah Paulson giving a solid performance in genre fare is about as ground-breaking as saying water is wet at this point. She's been good at this for over a decade. The reason this performance stands out is how she captures the slow meticulous breakdown of her mind and helps the audience feel sympathy for her (even if she turns dangerous).

She's high-strung due to grief and trauma so it's really hard for her to have empathy for her sister-in-law who doesn't sweep to keep the dust out. So when she finally snaps on a woman who's actively grieving, we've seen the little chips in her polite exterior be worn down.

I also think Paulson does a very good job at shifting between moments of lucidity and manic terror. The moments when she's trying to figure out if the person in front of her is a friend or foe feel very difficult and you see the anguish in her face as she tries to sort things out. So why doesn't this work?

The Hangup: External vs. Internal Pressure

Many of the best psychological horror movies come down to a single question: is our protagonist losing their mind? There are different ways you can address this question. Sometimes it's a question of whether or not something supernatural is happening. Other times it's a matter of whether our hero is sane or imagining threats. Could even be a game of sifting through what is real and what is fake (i.e. this part was totally real, but this part totally isn't or you've got an entirely diffierent conspiracy than you originally thought).

Hold Your Breath seems to want to do all of this...while also making it abundantly clear that its lead character is having a mental breakdown (nothing uncertain about it).

I'll use one character/thing as an example. Early in the film, Margaret's daughters are reading about a ghastly figure called "The Grey Man" (not the Netflix movie). This guy comes through the sandy shadows and preys on vulnerable women. So early on, the youngest daughter appears to see the Grey Man and freaks out accordingly. Is that a real thing that happened? Couldn't tell you because the only time this comes back up in an entirely different subplot involving a man who enters Margaret's barn after three fakeouts of the "Grey Man" being in the barn.

I'm all for keeping things vague, but considering how definitive the movie gets towards the end, this unclosed loops starts to stack up and distract away from the movie's most naturally terrifying elements...aka the elements. The dust that won't let them escape or live normally. The illness that killed and permanently scared members of this family. Dwindling resources. That's a ton of pressure that this situation naturally introduces...and then ignores it for another tale of a woman breaking under this pressure. That's what makes it hard to recommend, despite the strong start and Paulson's performance. We've seen the second half of this movie quite a lot, I want more of the first.