‘Hold Your Breath’: A Dust Bowl Babadook [Review]
Sarah Paulson has a certain venom about her. I mean that in the best way possible, of course. Fans of Ryan Murphy’s extended television universe, of which Paulson has remained a key player, likely recognize the ease with which a close-up of Paulson’s scrunched visage can convey infinite malice and tragedy, often at the same time. She remains eminently watchable because of that, and it’s a star quality that bolstered her first Hulu original—and, at the time, Hulu’s most successful original ever—Run. Paulson does a lot of heavy lifting in Karrie Crouse and Will Joines’ Hold Your Breath, premiering on Hulu October 3, though even the depths of her distinct talents aren’t enough to render Hold Your Breath anything more than a shallow riff on the dustbowl of horrors past.
Crouse’s script, credited solely to her despite co-directing duties, has a stellar idea at its core. The Dust Bowl was an innately tragic ecological occurrence. Several decades out, the phenomenon is also a uniquely cinematic one. The Dust Bowl is a touchstone in rural Americana storytelling, and Crouse and Joines earnestly capture the sheer majesty of nature run amok.
Contextually, then, Hold Your Breath retains interest. Not unlike this summer’s Twisters, there’s a can’t-look-away quality to the scale and scope of careening topsoil flurrying through the air. It’s the horror story at Hold Your Breath’s center that never finds its footing, ambling about in a storm of its own until the dust of a much better movie settles. The Babadook has been transplanted to Oklahoma. Squint and you might see him, but there’s too much debris in the way for a clearer picture.
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Paulson, as haunted matriarch Margaret Bellum, at least brings the requisite gravitas to her role. She’s gamely supported by Amiah Miller and Alona Jane Robbins as Rose and Ollie respectively, the two daughters she’s desperate to protect. Par for the trauma horror course, Margaret is already haunted at the outset of Hold Your Breath. Worn down by tragedy, she must contend with dwindling economic prospects and a well of grief before the horror starts in earnest. There’s little money, dust everywhere, and her husband is off to Philadelphia for a bridge project. He promises to send money back.
Meanwhile, Rose and Ollie are incredulously infatuated with the story of the Grey Man. Not the H.G. Wells short story, but the kind of kiddie fare that opens with, “Breathe him in, do terrible things.” Margaret’s slow unraveling is solidified by the arrival of Evon Moss-Bachrach’s Wallace Grady, an alleged preacher whose miracle work might be hiding more sinister intentions. You know the rest. Paulson, already beset by trauma of her own—she can’t even sleep in the same room as her two girls, lest she sleepwalk and do terrible things—convinces herself the Grey Man is real. He’s sneaking into her house at night, slipping into her lungs.
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Augmented by a thrumming soundtrack and a hazy, yellow hue, Hold Your Breath looks and sounds like so much of this decade’s horror. The trauma-centric beats are all there. The scares by means of jump-cuts are there (though a few, in fairness, did get me good). The ambiguous schism between monster and man—who should we really be afraid of? It’s there. Hold Your Breath, belying the antagonist at its center, breathes in so much of the genre’s past, that everything it exhales feels frustratingly familiar.
Committed performances and strong contextual elements generate interest, even if the well-trod merging of internal and external horror never comes together. The Dust Bowl shouldn’t be window dressing, yet as Hold Your Breath inches toward the end, that’s all it amounts to. I wouldn’t Hold Your Breath for something great, though at its best, it’s an hour-and-a-half of Hulu horror. Good for a stream, but not worth getting lost in.
Hold Your Breath is available to stream on Hulu on October 3.
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Hold Your Breath
Summary
Hold Your Breath is a swirling tempest of captivating ideas, though they never successfully congeal into anything that hasn’t been seen a dozen times before. Sarah Paulson shines, but Hold Your Breath gets lost in the storm.
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