Tag Archives: Ebon Moss-Bachrach

Dust to Dust

Hold Your Breath

by Hope Madden

Among the least examined perspectives in Westerns is the woman’s. In the rare instance that a filmmaker looks closely at what it was like for a woman on the wild frontier, the tale isn’t happy.

Earlier this year, writer/director/co-star Viggo Mortensen’s Western The Dead Don’t Hurt reexamined masculine nobility as abandonment. A decade ago, Tommy Lee Jones’s underseen The Homesman mined a very real phenomenon that befell many brides of the West. But Karrie Crouse and William Joines’s Hold Your Breath—actually set in the 1930s Oklahoma Dust Bowl rather than being a strict Western—feels more akin with Emma Tammi’s 2018 horror, The Wind.

The always magnificent Sarah Paulson is Margaret Bellum, mother to Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), left to keep the family together while her husband travels to build bridges until the rain returns and their little farm can flourish again. In the meantime, Margaret and the girls are surrounded on all sides, as far as the eye can see and even farther, by dry, useless dirt.

Like Tammi’s horror, Hold Your Breath weaves maternal tragedy with societal pressures and supernatural legend to create a sometimes-hypnotic descent into madness.

Paulson’s brittle sensibility never entirely loses its humanity thanks to her layered performance. Deepening the characterization with genuine tenderness for the girls elevates the “is she crazy or is this really happening” trope.

Supporting turns from Miller, Annaleigh Ashford and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) heighten tensions and call to mind the chill of an effective campfire tale. The filmmakers also capture a fear that permeates the God forsaken region with effective visual moments, often with Margaret and her needlework or a little boy and his makeshift mask. These moments are stark and eerie, but the film can’t seem to hold onto that feeling.

Paulson’s performance aches with a pain that is particular to a mother, and it’s this broken heartbeat that keeps Hold Your Breath compelling to its conclusion. Its horror is touched with a melancholy suited to the genre. The tension comes and goes, leaving you with less than promised, but the film has enough going for it to make it worth your time.

God Help Me, I Miss the Piñata

By Hope Madden

Enigmatic filmmaker Makinov (he wears a mask, which is weird) launches a new thriller this weekend called Come Out and Play, and it may feel pretty familiar. That could be because it is a nearly shot-for-shot remake of Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s little-seen 1976 flick Who Can Kill a Child? (released in the US as Island of the Damned).

Whether you saw that dusty gem or not, you’re still likely to find the film recognizable because Come Out and Play boils down to a familiar template: protagonists are stranded, hordes are killing everyone.  It could just as easily be a zombie film or an animal attack flick. Instead, it’s one of those nightmares that sees our own sweet tots turning on us.

Married couple Francis (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and a pretty pregnant Beth (Vinessa Shaw) are on holiday, heading to the remote island Punta Hueca. Once there, they find only dusty children running about – nary an adult turns up as they comb the isle for lunch, a shower and a bed.

They find out soon enough that they are 1) stranded, and 2) screwed.

For the majority of the film’s running time, we simply follow Beth and Francis as they walk, then run, then hide in and among abandoned island buildings. This span is, at times, tedious, frustrating, and full of bad decision making – but this is a horror film, and those particular elements do generate tension.

Makinov’s deliberate pacing and unique, unnerving use of sound work well with the slight plot, wringing as much anxiety as possible out of the stranded couple’s predicament. Wisely, he sidesteps a lot of the pitfall of “killer children” films by keeping the wee ones’ dialogue to a minimum, letting their menacing stares and maniacal glee do their talking for them.

Francis and Beth, on the other hand, have plenty of screen time to make an impression. They offer believable chemistry, and Moss-Bachrach, in particular, animates his character’s internal struggle quite well. Shaw grows tiresome, but it’s hard to beat the presence of a pregnant lady to limit movement and ramp up tension.

Makinov pulls some punches Serrador was happy to land (God help me, I  miss the pinata), but the film remains effectively disconcerting, offering a decent new vision of murderous children that’s worth a look.

Or, you could head to Netflix, where the dated but superior original is available on DVD.

3 stars (out of 5)