REVIEW: Hold Your Breath [2024]

Rating: R | Runtime: 94 minutes
Release Date: October 3rd, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Searchlight Pictures / Hulu
Director(s): Karrie Crouse & William Joines
Writer(s): Karrie Crouse

It’s like he just melted into the dust.

Margaret (Sarah Paulson) lost herself when young Ada died. The nightmares were too much to bear and the lack of sleep led to a blurring of reality. If not for the sleeping pills prescribed by her doctor, who knows what she might have done to her other two daughters? But things are calm now. Margaret understands the importance of staying clear-headed and strong for Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie’s (Alona Jane Robbins) protection. Between the dust storms, her husband’s absence for work, stories of homicidal drifters, and her own demons, those pills are the only thing keeping her together.

Karrie Crouse (who also wrote) and William Joines’ Hold Your Breath uses its 1930s Oklahoma panhandle setting to put this grieving and desperate mother’s back against the wall. Margaret has already lost one child to the oppressive elements inherent to her dust bowl circumstances. Her sister Esther (Annaleigh Ashford) is barely holding on down the road with a coughing son and unraveling means with which to combat the poor air quality. And the weekly knitting circle has nothing better to talk about than salacious rumors that prove as fear-inducing as the story of “The Grey Man” that Rose tells Ollie before bed.

What’s compelling about these mounting stresses, however, is that Margaret is up to the task. Whereas she was her family’s own worst enemy before, she’s now become its hero willing to do whatever is necessary. Sweeping every last dust particle out of the house each morning. Stuffing torn linens into the cracks in the bedroom walls. Patrolling the perimeter with a shotgun to ensure no one is lurking about. Margaret is arguably too alert considering how tough she is with Esther and others for refusing to go that extra mile themselves. Rose and Ollie are wanting for nothing until a stranger wanders onto their property. A kindly preacher (Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Wallace) as likely to be their savior as he is their demise.

It’s one thing to trust yourself to not be the problem when everything is in order, but it’s another to do so when the world is crashing down. The second Margaret believes this man to be a threat, all her hard work evaporates. How can she sleep if her kids are in danger? How can she be ready to protect them if she doesn’t get any sleep? And who’s to say sleep would help if this figure is only but a vessel for the very entity Margaret assured Ollie wasn’t real? Because if “The Grey Man” does exist amongst the dust, he’ll float through the air until a new host breathes him in. There’s no telling who might be next.

Hold Your Breath proves a beautifully shot and slow yet purposeful psychological thriller with a precisely measured shift from clarity to confusion. Every little detail becomes a knock at the door of Margaret’s mind. Death. Murder. Coughs. Bloody noses. Wallace (Moss-Bachrach expertly toes the line between good and evil as well as real and imagined). Crouse’s script is cause and effect at a microscopic level within Margaret’s body. This is a mother trying to hold onto that which brought her back from the precipice of oblivion only to find her grip slipping with each new potential danger until she becomes the greatest hazard of them all.

Paulson is great in the role—simultaneously fearsome and empathetic because we understand where she’s coming from. Her actions are justified (to a point), but the era refuses to provide the means with which to adequately assist her in pursuing justice. Margaret knows what happens if she fails. Ada is proof of that. She also knows what happens if she loses herself again thanks to Esther’s mirror. So, when she does (because it’s always a matter of when rather than if), there’s no turning back. It doesn’t matter if her truth proves to be a delusion. It can’t be one for her. She must believe the nightmare because there can be no saving face. Once you give “The Grey Man” form, it’s already too late.