Hulu Movie Review – ‘Hold Your Breath’ kicks off Spooky Season with historical horror

Sarah Paulson is no stranger to the creepy and psychologically scarring. Hold Your Breath (2024) debuting on Hulu in October provides the perfect-sepia-toned start to Spooky Season for the homebody in all of us.

Margaret (Sarah Paulson) and her children, older Rose (Amiah Miller) and younger Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins) attempt to ride out the storms of the Oklahoma dustbowl in the 1930s. Margaret has already lost a child to scarlet fever and has taken extreme steps not to lose any more. Margaret’s unseen husband has gone east to search for work, sending occasional letters from home, leaving her to fretfully fend off the drought and ever-present dirt and dust that builds up in the corners and lungs of everyone left behind. While not enough to simply survive, the small town with its dwindling population is also menaced by an unseen wanderer dubbed by Rose as the Gray Man, who sneaks into homes and barns to rob, assault, and murder anyone who gets in his way. As a new round of storms rise on the horizon, Margaret discovers that greetings from afar do not bring glad tidings and her very own past threatens the stability of her home, her family and her sanity.

Hold Your Breath weaves together elements of isolation, hopelessness, and the wrath of nature to create a tense situation where rash and fatal decisions are expected. It’s fair to say Margaret isn’t dealing well with the constant dust situation, falling to compulsive sweeping and filling cracks in walls and around windows with any spare fabric and it’s enough to keep even the most casual viewer on edge. Her performance is reminiscent of Nicole Kidman in The Others (2001) where Grace’s maniacal routine of opening doors only as others are closed and keeping the drapes drawn feels too brittle to be just good sense. Paulson’s Margaret constantly chastises her neighbor Birdie Mae (Courtney Cunningham) about her cleanliness as her children suffer from dust-induced pneumonia. The teetering of reality in the face of desperate survival is expertly crafted by writer-director Karrie Crouse, who keeps the threats of man and weather simple but elegant.

Hold Your Breath is a well-paced thriller that relies on only the mere threat of severe weather in an age of candles, well water, and prayer. Its psychological slant of unattended women in the grips of maternal mania doesn’t feel derivative or pandering. Miller and Robbins stand strong as her children facing the loss of normalcy in an unending swirl of dust and dead crops, while the adults around them slowly lose their minds. Robbins is a deaf actor and ASL was well-worked into this screenplay adding to the level of internal and external isolation.

Hold Your Breath may not have a quick enough pace or bloody enough action for every viewer looking for chills during Spooky Season. Still, at 94 minutes, it’s a worthy addition to a night of weather-related horrors, maybe squeezed in between Take Shelter (2011) and The Lodge (2019). If you feel itchy, it’s working.

Hold Your Breath (2024) is Rated R for mild swears, unsettling visions, children in danger, sewing mishaps, people getting stabbed, suffocation, the ever-present hacking cough, and sand literally everywhere.