Hold Your Breath wastes everything it has to offer

The setting is 1930s Oklahoma, and Margaret (Sarah Paulson) is gasping for air. She has just woken up from a dream of lush wheat fields, of her daughters’ laughter, and then, suddenly, an endless cloud of gray dust. It is a difficult task, from breathing easily to choking. Hold your breaththe film she’s at the center of feels much the same.

It’s Dust Bowl times and Margaret and her two daughters are at the mercy of massive dust storms and a seemingly endless drought, while the green fields that lured them to Oklahoma are a distant fantasy. Although times are hard, Margaret lives a respectable way of life: sweeping and dusting, caring for the only cow left on the farm, helping others in her community, more dusting. But as she does housework, she begins to worry that something more malevolent is threatening her family – and that she may have to go to great lengths to protect them.

Hold your breath‘s promise is tempting: Dust Bowl horror! When the air itself clogs men’s lungs, and the cracked, dry land stretches before them forever. The thought that someone (or something) is threatening, what little is left makes the situation all the more delightful (at least from the audience’s perspective).

There’s an obvious parallel to COVID here: for anyone who remembers the feeling of helpless confusion over which air was “clean” and what could cause the worst cough you’ve ever heard in your life: Hold your breath‘s portrayal of a woman on the edge should feel more powerful than it ultimately does. Instead, the story is suffocated by all the things that are crammed in along the way. There’s the Gray Man legend, the spooky story that scares the whole family, about a man who turns to dust and makes you do bad things as soon as you breathe him in. There are the men of the community, working far away to build a bridge (to the future, one assumes), leaving the women to take care of the home they have left. There’s Margaret’s already fragile mental state after the death of one daughter, and the constant threat of losing another to the toxic air. Her sewing shop spreads gruesome rumors about a violent drifter, while Margaret’s good friend seems to lose her mind amid all the dust and tragedy.

This is a lot to contend with, but as a list it sounds like a group of things that could potentially feel in harmony with each other. The failure of the country, society, the family unit, even the walls of Margaret’s house not being able to keep out the dust – they are all interconnected, and they fray Margaret a little more and more. And yet Hold your breath feels as stuck as Margaret: they both have too much going on. As various aspects of her life fall apart, the film moves briskly forward, searching for comfort in relatively isolated blocks. By the time all the storylines come together, the story feels too messy to make sense. It doesn’t matter whether the worst threat to this farm is a supernatural wanderer or a mental breakdown; none of the storylines can breathe well enough to pack such a punch.

Once the dust settles, Hold your breath offers little more than another trauma as a metaphorreducing the promise of its horror to more of a pat movie. It’s a shame really, because beneath all that grime there’s still a glimmer of a deeper unraveling if the story had been more focused. The glimpses we get of Margaret’s mental anguish make for some chilling individual scenes – of Margaret trying to maintain normality in front of her fellow townspeople, or covering her windows during the day so that ‘it’s so much easier to breathe’. But all that fear can’t actually convey the terror the story deserves. Instead of, Hold your breath chokes on its own airlessness and remains barren.

Hold your breath is now streaming on Hulu.