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Film Review | Horror
Hold Your Breath (2024) — an over-ambitious, paranoid Dust Bowl meltdown
In 1930s Oklahoma amid the region’s horrific dust storms, a woman is convinced that a sinister presence is threatening her family.
Paranoia, claustrophobia, and narrative economy seem to be an unholy trinity that’s all the rage for a multitude of recent horror releases. It’s an effective trend when wielded well, something that stems back from Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), through Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night (2017), and now Karrie Crouse and Will Joines’s Hold Your Breath — all tales of insulated, threatened families descending into madness from the dangers that lie within. But where the former two films dabble exclusively either in the paranormal or the speculative, the lattermost’s initial selling point is the fact that its threat was terrifyingly real, a literal force of nature that swept through Oklahoma through a troubled point of American history; the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
Caught in the throes of its catastrophic aridity is the Bellum family — Margaret (Sarah Paulson) and her two daughters, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), who’ve sent their father out of state to build bridges for work, all while freshly grieving the loss of their youngest, Ada. Their everyday life is a struggle to preserve their health; Margaret is neurotically meticulous about keeping every speck of dust sealed and swept out of their house, not helped by how she’s frequently afflicted by nightmares of losing her two surviving daughters in a violent dust storm. The insular Oklahoma village the Bellums live in is similarly troubled by the persistent dust; for one, Esther (Annaleigh Ashford), Margaret’s sister, has a son named Thomas (Nathan Gariety) whose coughing shows no sign of ceasing anytime soon and is only growing coarser by the minute.
