‘Hold Your Breath’ Review – Sarah Paulson Can’t Save a Predictable Frontier Tale [TIFF]

Hold Your Breath opens with a nightmare. It’s a recurring nightmare of Margaret Bellum’s (Sarah Paulson): every night she goes to sleep and finds herself caught in the middle of cruel Oklahoma dust storm. She’s quickly forced to the ground, choking. Then when she’s about to die, Margaret awakens, gasping for breath.

Written by Karrie Crouse and co-directed by Crouse and frequent collaborator Will Joines, Hold Your Breath is a period drama with hints of the supernatural. The film follows Margaret as a woman forced to hold down the home front during the Depression of the 30s. While her husband is away seeking work to keep their dying farm afloat, Margaret looks after her two daughters: beautiful teenager Rose (Amiah Miller) and pre-teen Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), who lost her hearing and ability to speak after a bout of scarlet fever.

Margaret isn’t entirely alone. She has a sister, Esther (Annaleigh Ashford), but the woman is immediately coded as less resourceful than Margaret. Esther’s situation is nearly the same as Margaret’s, but Esther’s home is run-down and her youngest boy, Thomas (Nathan Gariety), has a persistent, worrying cough due to pneumonia.

It’s obvious what Margaret thinks of Esther as she surveys the dust in the air and the coated surfaces of her furniture. When tragedy strikes later, Margaret marvels at her sister’s foolishness for trying to flee during a sand storm and barks at her to try sweeping instead of crying. This is a harsh and intolerant world and people like Margaret must do what it takes to survive.

But the dust is pervasive in Hold Your Breath. It’s the literal manifestation of the harsh environment: in a time of drought, with dwindling food and money, Margaret believes that remaining steadfast and deliberate will allow her and her daughters to persist. Keeping the dust out can mean the difference between life and death.

But then a strange man (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is discovered in the barn, and Rose begins to suffer from nosebleeds, and the cow’s milk runs dry. And just like that, Margaret’s tenacity begins to crumble.

Hold Your Breath explores a few interweaving storylines, including the toll these events exact on Margaret’s sanity, as well as the way The Grey Man, a ghost story that Rose reads to Ollie, can take on a life of its own.

These are interesting ideas, and Paulson, Moss-Bachrach and Miller, in particular, do solid work. In fact, nearly all of the technical aspects of the film, including Zoë White’s beautiful white and beige cinematography and Colin Wilkes’ period costumes, are well-executed.

That’s not where the problem lies.

It’s Hold Your Breath’s overly familiar narrative that dooms the film. In fact, Crouse’s script shows its hand in the first few minutes, which makes the 94-minute film feel interminably long because the audience is left waiting for its characters to stumble on a “reveal” that has been obvious from the start.

Alas it’s not just the end of the film that’s predictable. It’s the whole script. At nearly every juncture, Hold Your Breath takes the expected route, but it treats every new development as revelatory.  The dreams? The Grey Man infiltrating the house? The jar of sleeping pills that Margaret consumes each night? All very, very obvious, which then becomes frustrating.

Crouse and Joines don’t help themselves with their self-serious framing: every speck of dust in the air, every silt-covered surface, every ruffling strip of fabric stuffed into crevices is presented as a beautiful dark omen. Ditto Colin Stetson’s overbearing, ubiquitous score; it’s as though no one trusts the audience what to feel or when.

It’s a shame because Hold Your Breath is unequivocally beautiful and its themes – about frontier resilience and the burden placed on women to assume the role of both provider and mother – are compelling.

But all the good is undone by a ponderous script that telegraphs everything. No amount of technical expertise, not even Paulson’s desperate central performance, can salvage what is ultimately a very weak, predictable script.

Hold Your Breath had its world premiere at TIFF 2024. It premieres on Hulu on Oct 3, 2024.