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Sarah Paulson in Hold Your Breath

Sarah Paulson Can’t Act Her Way Out of ‘Hold Your Breath’

By Lindsay Traves | Film | October 3, 2024 |

By Lindsay Traves | Film | October 3, 2024 |


Sarah Paulson in Hold Your Breath

Isolation can be ruthless, as we all experienced in the years leading up to this Hulu horror installment. Hiding from the terrors of mother nature is a daunting exercise for anyone, even a hard-as-nails matriarch who’s equally equipped to battle with a broom as she is with a shotgun.

That matriarch is played by Sarah Paulson, a grieving mother forced to keep her remaining children alive in the harrowing 1930s dust bowl. Her husband is away, reality is at the behest of her medication taking whims, and Margaret (Paulson) is forced to care for her family by keeping their cow alive to feed them and their cracks sealed lest the dust enter their home and their lungs. Early on, she seems beyond adept, frustrated by the sloppy actions of her sister, Ester (Annaleigh Ashford), and with her and her own children breathing with ease and always donning pristine hair and clothing. Margaret and her cohorts’ enemy is the dust, bringing illness and famine, broken up only by neighborhood dances and cross stitch gatherings.

The period drama about choking on an uncontrollable respiratory threat also dances with the supernatural, nightmares and visions haunting Margaret and her family spilling out from the pages of a story about “The Grey Man,” who can slip through any cracks and enter your lungs. With the ladies of the town worrying about a violent vagrant, and the sudden arrival of a priest claiming to have known her husband (Ebon Moss-Bach), Margaret grows increasingly paranoid and desperate to feed her family and protect them from whatever the form the dust might take.

It’s all just too much. The 1930’s dust is enough of a foe, and the harsh conditions of a resourceless family could create the sort of haunting paranoia we saw in The Witch (which also blended in the supernatural more effectively). Instead, Hold Your Breath gets lots in the sandstorm, confusing a tale of loneliness and hardship with one of a woman slowly unraveling. And it does so with hands full of twists and turns that anyone could see coming.

Margaret is early on seen choking down Chekov’s medication, the marooned family spends too much time comfortable and out, a strange man’s arrival in their barn is immediately menacing, and everything starts to crumble with conveniences like handwritten notes full of exposition and characters meeting at opportune times. Sure, we expect writers to place the necessary moments into their scripts and build drama how it makes sense to, but this overstuffed collection of different sub-genres often means churning through as many twists and resolutions on time to catch up to the next one. It could be thrilling, but most everything is so telegraphed that much of the movie feels like watching its characters rush to catch up to what we’re already expecting to take place.

Paulson is a horror darling for a reason, and she does her absolute best to attempt to elevate this film. As the competent and trustworthy lead that we’re meant to slowly reevaluate, Paulson stuns in a layered performance showcasing her strength and vulnerability in concert. It’s perhaps only she who could have stepped into Leonardo DiCaprio’s role in Shutter Island. But she can only do so much, and her dream sequences and horror finale feel isolated in a film that’s otherwise trying to play the hits in time for the credits to roll. Moss-Bach does a couple interesting things when he is given time to, and his one moment will remind you why he’s such a consistent cast for supporting characters.

Hold Your Breath is unfortunately small for a movie with such big ideas. The setting isn’t claustrophobic in the way you’d expect a sealed house to be, but it feels cramped within the walls of a small town with geography that’s distant farmhouses surrounded by sprawling fields of dust. Margaret’s relationship with her daughters might have held it together, but they become secondary to so many other things that we can’t get enough from the complex feelings of fear, love, and dependence. I’ll wait happily and eagerly for Paulson to bring me the next comforting movie built on her screams, but this isn’t the one.

Hold Your Breath had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and lands on Hulu (and Disney+ in Canada) on October 3, 2024.