Hold Your Breath (2024), directed by Karrie Crouse & William Joines, stars Sarah Paulson, Amiah Miller, Alona Jane Robbins, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Annaleigh Ashford, Arron Shiver, and Bill Heck. The film follows Margaret Bellum (Paulson) and her two daughters, Rose (Miller) & Ollie (Robbins), as they struggle to survive in Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma after the family patriarch, Henry (Heck), leaves to find work. As their food dwindles and the dust storms become more violent, Margaret becomes convinced that a sinister entity known as The Grey Man is threatening her family. When a mysterious preacher (Moss-Bachrach) claiming to know Henry arrives asking for shelter, Margaret reluctantly agrees. This begins a series of events threatening to loosen Margaret’s grip on reality and doom her family to a dark fate. 

The performances here are typical – nothing bad, nothing great. Paulson has a lot of experience in horror and goes through the genre’s motions with ease. Moss-Bachrach’s mysterious preacher character is the most compelling of the cast, but he’s heavily underutilized. The best portions of the movie feature his character and when he’s absent, it’s noticeable. 

The Dust Bowl setting is unique for the genre and helps build tension during daytime sequences. The problem is that the movie is often tense, but it’s never quite scary. I think this is due to a few reasons, the first being that the script seems to lack a clear direction. This helps things a bit in terms of being unpredictable, but it hinders the movie from achieving any sort of effective set-up during its first two acts, causing the third act to quickly fall apart. The second reason is that it features multiple dream/vision sequences where the main character sees bad things to come. When a movie is filled with meaningless “scares,” it only takes away power from the ones that matter. The final reason the scares don’t work is that the story is far too slow-paced for being only 95 minutes long. It takes almost 30 minutes for the inciting incident to occur, which wouldn’t be as big of a criticism, but nothing important or interesting happens during those 30 minutes.

The movie is also so all over the place in its approach that I struggle to understand what it’s trying to say besides “life is hard, you might go crazy.” Is it a realistic Dust Bowl survival thriller, supernatural thriller, psychological thriller, or serial killer thriller? I’m not saying pick a lane, but maybe at least cut down on the number of lanes. 

All this being said, the movie doesn’t result in something that feels like a complete disaster. At the very least, it’s a more original experience than some of the other, lesser horror films released this year. For once, it feels like releasing this on streaming was the right choice. It’s good enough to watch for free, but it most likely would have tainted the experience further if I was forced to pay for a ticket. C