‘Hold Your Breath’ (2024) Review – Full Of Hot And Dry Air

There are films like Hold Your Breath on every streaming network. Not to mention, they don’t have to be streamed on Halloween. The reason is that horror films are cheap and have a built-in audience. With advances in special effects, any influencer or YouTuber can now create a video with a green piece of fabric in the background, and the possibilities for something spooky are endless.

The difference between spooky and frightening is close, but that small gap might be as wide as the Oklahoma panhandle. That’s the issue Hold Your Breath has. You may initially find some intrigue in an unusual setting like the 1930s Dust Bowl era. Yet, as the film progresses, the script fluctuates between below average and slightly above, never excelling at one thing and being barely average at many.

Hold Your Breath brings an adequate atmosphere to the streaming horror-thriller genre. However, overusing a crutch for oversaturating special effects becomes trite. That could all be condoned, except for the handful of red herrings that make the film’s third act feel like a cheap cliche.

Sarah Paulson stars in Hold Your Breath, her second psychological horror film for Hulu in four years. (We can only hope for a third, stamping them with the phrase the “Paulu Horror Trilogy.”) Paulson plays Margaret Bellum, a lonely mother fighting to keep her daughters alive in the “Dirty Thirties,” a crisis caused by a powerful combination of severe drought brought on by overfarming, massive soil erosion, and devastating dust storms.

Margaret is raising the children on her own. She has a teenager, Rose (War for the Planet of the Apes‘s Amiah Miller), coming into her own. Margaret also has a young adolescent, Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins, a Deaf child actor). She is a deaf child with selective mutism, most likely due to psychological responses to such extreme physical and mental conditions.

The family is still dealing with the loss of another child, who died of scarlet fever. The family has had a tough life, waiting for the man of home to send money after he finds work, bringing the family back together. The hay is becoming scarce. They cannot feed their cow, their only food source, which is becoming emaciated from the famine.

Hold Your Breath was written by Westworld scribe Karrie Crouse, who co-directed the film with frequent collaborator Will Joines (Be Still). It only truly gets going when The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach comes on screen. The Emmy Award-winning actor plays Wallace Grady, a traveling preacher looking for a warm barn and maybe a meal. However, it turns out that Grady happens to know Margaret’s husband, who is away trying to find work.

Crouse and Joines create an atmosphere that begins to captivate—the sight of children wearing makeshift masks that withstand the harsh dust, full of symbolism. A tone and pace, combining cinematography with an overall aesthetic that can be striking, captures the ominous mood of the Great Depression through a Midwest lens. The film has a dark and enigmatic feel, a barren wasteland full of isolation, loneliness, anxiety, and depression.

The film’s best scenes are with Paulson and Moss-Bachrach. However, things become apparent that this is just a “dust” screen, if you will. The script makes the fatal mistake of giving away the secret of a critical character too quickly. This is meant as misdirection.

Yet, it becomes apparent where the film is heading. Even more so if you listen closely to Margaret’s revelations to the preacher. Although you may hope the movie would take a turn toward the mystical—sort of like a makeshift HBO’s Carnivàle—the script attempts to keep too much of the film in the realm of drama instead of embracing its frightening roots.

Hold Your Breath would have worked much better as a drama. For example, leaning in towards embracing the psychological zealotry of religion that held sway over the area in times of great stress. Additionally, going the other way by amping up an extreme horror angle. For example, if the script began embracing the story of “The Grey Man,” a type of urban legend surrounding the Dust Bowl, the children obsess over.

That could have given Hold Your Breath a few thrills the movie desperately needed. Instead, we get a film that never fully embraces what it wants to be. The film resorts to red herrings, causing the third-act twist to feel like a cheap cliché. This horror-thriller is full of hot and dry air.

Hold Your Breath is currently available to stream exclusively on Hulu.