Debuting feature film directors Karrie Crouse and Will Joines describe their cinematic inspirations for Hold Your Breath as a bit of Kubrick’s The Shining and The Others with the visual panache of Malick’s Days of Heaven. After seeing the Searchlight film, which had its world premiere as one of the Toronto Film Festival’s Special Presentations last month and will begin streaming Friday on Hulu, I thought more of another movie, now 40 years old. Places in the Heart won Sally Field a second Oscar (“You really like me!”) as a widow in Depression-era North Texas trying to survive the elements threatening her farm and her two young children.
I also thought a bit about the great Todd Haynes 1995 drama Safe, with Julianne Moore hiding behind a gas mask to avoid the dangers in our environment. This film falls short of those but is memorable enough to make an impression all its own.
In Hold Your Breath, newly minted Tony winner Sarah Paulson plays Margaret, a woman of the land who is going it alone without her husband who has left to go look for work. She is bringing up her two young daughters, 12-year-old Rose (Amiah Miller) and 7-year-old deaf Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), following the scarlet fever death of her other daughter, Ada. Set right in the heart of the Dust Bowl in 1930s Oklahoma (New Mexico stands in for the location), Margaret is battling nature’s elements of constant dust storms, not to mention famine, disease and death all around.
There are the few townspeople she has to keep her sane for the most part as their homestead, a sparsely furnished house (Tim Grimes is the production designer), sits alone in the wilderness of this barren landscape, the kind of place you might easily go mad in. And that is exactly what we slowly witness in the case of Margaret, who is also dealing with a mysterious stranger, Wallace Grady (The Bear double Emmy winner Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a self-described preacher and healer who does in fact profess he has “cured” Rose’s chronic nosebleeds and promises to make Ollie hear again. He is a bit of a rainmaker and an increasingly menacing presence who begins to haunt Margaret, especially as he claims to know much about her husband.
Margaret also has a sister-in-law (Annaleigh Ashford) initially going through as much if not more turmoil with her family and need to survive. But as Margaret emerges from her own darkness, she seems to descend further into madness in a way that she is seeing dangerous visions far more frequently as strange things happen — or do they?
This is all very much in the terrifying psychological-thriller mode, a subtle horror film in which the environment is a key villain, the killer dust seemingly turning into the much-feared fictional “Grey Man.” It is a pressure cooker all too easily consuming Margaret. Crouse (who also wrote the screenplay) and Joines succeed best here in creating a landscape of sheer terror due to the intensity of dust, sensationally rendered by visual effects wizards Dale Fay and Werner Hahnlein, with the help of cinematographer Zoe White’s haunting images. Although not a typical horror film, this is a far more quiet fright sparked by Mother Nature but playing with the utmost fears of our main characters.
Paulson again proves she is one of the best out there, making us believe situations that might seem far-fetched in lesser hands as she holds, however wobbly, the flag for motherhood. Well cast are the kids, notably Miller as Rose, the older daughter who at first is under her mother’s protection before becoming the protector herself for sister Ollie, played by the exceptional young deaf actress Robbins who nails the role. Ashford has some choice eerie moments, and Moss-Bachrach knows how to get inside a con man.
The filmmakers also were inspired by a Ken Burns documentary set in the same kind of environment and thought they could use that germ of an idea to expand into this fictional story. The script was written in 2019, before the pandemic, but this story proves timely with characters talking behind masks in order to avoid what is blowing about outside and inside their heads. It serves as a nice metaphor as well as providing a few jump-scares, but is more psychological than anything that will make you actually hold your breath. Nevertheless, it’s impressively shot and certainly worth seeing just for the atmospherics on display, and the ever-wonderful Paulson.
Producers are Alix Madigan and Lucas Joaquin.
Title: Hold Your Breath
Distributor: Searchlight Pictures
Directors: Karrie Crouse, Will Joines
Screenwriter: Karrie Crouse
Cast: Sarah Paulson, Amiah Miller, Annaleigh Ashford, Alona Jane Robbins, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Arron Shiver
Release date: October 3, 2024 (streaming on Hulu)
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hr 34 mins
