‘Hold Your Breath’ Review: New Horror Movie Full Of Old Scares
Clapboards slam and crack like thunder. The weathervane creaks like a listing warship. When the wind, heavy with unceasing dust, whooshes, rumbles and roars, it’s as if the L train is clattering by, six inches from your apartment window.
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HOLD YOUR BREATH ★★ (2/4 stars) |
A domestic horror thriller set in the Oklahoma panhandle during the late 1930s Dust Bowl, Hold Your Breath is a veritable orgy of Foley. Along with a music score that sounds like someone trying to tune a wire fence while clanking forks on a stop sign, this aggressive soundscape intends to ground you with the vulnerable protagonists in an isolated farmhouse imperiled by the elements. Instead, all of this furious, empty noise keeps reminding you that you’re watching a cheesy horror film that is not confident enough in the story it’s telling to avoid succumbing to old tricks.
It is a shame that the North Carolina-based directing team of Karrie Crouse and Will Joines—working from a script by Crouse that was once on the vaunted Black List—laden their film with bump-in-the-night horror tropes rather than allow it to, well, breathe. (This movie never met a jump cut it couldn’t milk.) After all, their film boasts at its center an intense and forceful performance by American Horror Story’s Sarah Paulson, who is always more than willing to tear her psyche into shreds in the service of freaking us out.
Paulson plays Margaret Bellum, a seemingly practical homesteader taxed with keeping her two daughters Rose (War for the Planet of the Apes’ Amiah Miller) and Ollie (deaf actor Alona Jane Robbins) housed and fed during an environmental catastrophe. Margaret is preoccupied with the trauma of having already lost a third daughter, Ada, to scarlet fever and with the Grey Man, an evil spirit that can supposedly form and dissolve in the shifting dust and is featured in the girls’ storybook, the only form of entertainment inside the house outside of needlepointing. (The movie tries desperately, with not much success, to make embroidering seem really creepy.)
The Grey Man is a demon, a red herring, or possibly The Bear’s Cousin Richie. That show’s Emmy-winning co-star Ebon Moss-Bachrach emerges from a crawl space in the barn as Wallace Grady, a self-professed man of the cloth who claims to know Margaret’s husband—he’s up north looking for work—and appears to heal Rose’s chronic nosebleeds.
Like the overabundance of haunted house sound drops, the presence of this malevolent force belies the filmmaker’s disbelief that the audience will remain invested in the fate of the Bellum women without a fire sale of ideas pilfered from other horror movies—from The Shining to The Witch to The Fog to The Others.
Still, Paulson’s deft attenuation of her character’s descent—a fierce performance that is matched step-for-step by Miller’s disbelief and Robbins’ stoicism—keeps Hold Your Breath from being completely dismissible. As is the case with most horror movies (especially those that rely on jump scares) Hold Your Breath’s virtues, however limited, are best experienced in a proper movie house. (I caught it at Santa Monica’s glorious Aero Theatre as part of American Cinematheque’s Beyond Fest.)
Unfortunately, this Hulu Original Film branded Searchlight Pictures movie, which premiered last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, opens Oct. 3 on streaming only. It seems giving a traditional theatrical release to this genre picture was simply too exhausting a prospect for the films’ Disney overlords. This imperfect film, the imposing Paulson, and her talented costars all deserve better.