For a film about the way isolation can start to tear us apart, it’s perhaps fitting that “Hold Your Breath” can barely hold together.
This isn’t for lack of trying on the part of lead Sarah Paulson, who throws herself into the role and comes out covered in dust for her efforts as the rubble of the film nearly swallows her whole. Neither a successful psychological thriller nor a compelling work of horror, it’s all built around the steady unraveling of a matriarch who finds herself facing a variety of threats while isolated with her two daughters. It’s a promising hook, similar to “The Wind” from 2018, though the film never gets a handle on what to do with it. All the threats bounce between being terrifyingly real or potentially more slippery, robbing the experience of oxygen as you are stuck waiting for it to find something approximating an emotional heart.
There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with having unreliable characters and us having to find a grounding point as an audience, though “Hold Your Breath” leaves us adrift without one. The characters are underwritten, the pacing oddly impatient, and the moments of what could be genuine fear undercut by an overcranked score that never settles down for more than a second.
The film, which premiered Thursday at the Toronto International Festival, throws us into dust bowl Oklahoma in the 1930s where Margaret (Paulson) is trying to look after her daughters, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), while waiting for her husband to return from a job. She’s already lost a child and is doing everything she can to make sure that doesn’t happen again. The small community is all struggling as the storms are relentless, the rains nonexistent and the isolation suffocating.
Even attempting to leave can be perilous as the winds can knock over wagons and leave you lost in the storm. This is something we feel via a quite effective opening sequence where Margaret is frantically looking for her children in one such storm with Paulson yelling out in chilling fashion. Though we see this is a dream, this is a great way to start. Sadly, the rest of the film soon gets swept away as the story shifts into being increasingly scattershot the longer it carries on. Dialogue lands flat and reveals don’t carry much of any weight as the whole thing just drags along to what is a lackluster descent into darkness.
Namely, there is a story that’s read about the sinister Grey Man (not the dreadful 2022 action film) and how he can sneak into the home to torment you through even the smallest of cracks. This is something that Margaret dismisses, though it has everyone more than a little rattled as they begin to contemplate that this being could be everywhere and anywhere, just waiting for you to breathe him in.
Without tipping anything off, “Hold Your Breath” is rather explicit about this being a metaphor, leaving little room for ambiguity or terror to come from the unknown. Instead, it mostly plays as a more confined drama than it does a true work of horror. Everything just feels too narrow in both story and emotion for this to then work. The painfully small setting isn’t the problem, as an actual horror film that also showed at the festival, “Else,” proved that the most creative of visions can come from the most confined of circumstances. The issue is that “Hold Your Breath” is too content to go through the motions that it telegraphs over and over.
This predictability leaves Paulson having to do quite a bit of heavy lifting to keep us engaged and, the remarkable thing is, she almost pulls it off. The way we see fear start to creep into Margaret’s expressions even as she tries to hold herself together is quite unsettling, but the film will always cut away before we have even a moment to let it sink in.
We can see where this is going, but rarely do we feel anything as it guides us there. Left with little emotional heft, the search for something more engaging on the margins proves futile. There is a small through line about how, when people begin to struggle with the weight of the world, society at large will just take their children and leave them to suffer that could have been intriguing. What would it have been like had the film actually excavated how insidious this can be? Regrettably, this never gets much care or thought, merely serving as a hollow plot device to further cut Margaret off from the world for a series of nighttime scares. Even as some of these scenes can occasionally look striking on the surface in terms of how they are shot, they are all empty underneath.
There is a good movie wandering through the storm of “Hold Your Breath,” but it gets lost long before we’re able to actually get a good look at it. Even as Paulson is putting her all into the film and can firmly grab hold of you at some moments as her strong-willed matriarch comes undone, much like the dust that is floating around the confined setting, it all slips through her fingers.
