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.
