To call Sarah Paulson a generational talent might sound like hyperbole, but it’s far closer to the truth than not. From reinventing herself every season for Ryan Murphy’s long-running anthology series, American Horror Story, to a much-deserved Emmy Award for American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson, and a Tony Award-winning turn in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play, Appropriate—it’s relatively easy to conclude there’s little Paulson can’t do in any media, live or recorded.
Despite Paulson’s unsurprisingly unimpeachable efforts to deliver another level-best performance, she can’t save Hold Your Breath. A psychological horror film from first-time filmmakers Karrie Crouse and William Joines, it is a stagnant, frequent inert narrative with repetitive, character-flattening scenes and a premise that announces its all-too-predictable ending the moment seconds after the film begins.
Paulson’s character, Margaret Bellum, is a de facto single woman mightily struggling to keep herself and her two daughters, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), alive during the 1930s Dust Bowl that devastated vast swaths of the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles. Set four years into the economy-shattering Great Depression, Hold Your Breath follows the trio as they try to survive day-to-day in an inhospitable land. Due to severe, long-lasting drought conditions, poor topsoil management, and an absence of state or federal intervention (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first, transformative term and the New Deal was just beginning), Margaret and people like her face an existential crisis: Stay and hope for the best or, like many did during the Dust Bowl, abandon everything they’ve spent their lives building for an uncertain future out West. Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and filmmaker John Ford, of course, chronicled the latter alternative in novel and cinematic form, The Grapes of Wrath, respectively.
Margaret’s husband left the family to seek employment elsewhere before Hold Your Breath even begins, adding to the suffocating pressure on Margaret to provide not just her daughters’ material health, but their mental and emotional health as well. Overwhelmingly driven by maternal instincts to protect and feed her daughters, plus a fixation on a third daughter, Ada, who died, Margaret repeatedly, stubbornly refuses to consider leaving the family farm. Her life’s meaning starts and ends with a dying farmstead she can’t abandon without sacrificing a sense of self.
Focussed as it is on Margaret’s deteriorating mental condition, Hold Your Breath leans heavily into her thoughts, dreams, and desires. Her dreams—some comforting, some not—merge with her everyday reality. When a preacher-pastor appears on the farm, Wallace Grady (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), seemingly out of nowhere, claiming to know Margaret’s husband and to be capable of healing the sick, he might be “real” within the world of the film or he might be the result of Margaret’s overactive, fevered imagination. He may be a symbolic projection promising salvation for true believers and damnation for non-believers.
And therein lies Hold Your Breath’s central, ultimately insurmountable, problem: Once Crouse and Joines tip their hand about Margaret’s crumbling psychological state, it turns into a slow, scare-free slog toward a muted, emotionally unsatisfying ending, and an abrupt, flat denouement. Dust storms come and go (some better visualized than others), the family survives by any means necessary, keeping the audience modestly engaged. Even as fully committed as she is, Paulson struggles to elevate thin, underdeveloped material that was probably better suited to an episode of a horror anthology series.
Hold Your Breath is now available for streaming via Disney+ in Canada and Hulu in the United States.