Crew
Directors – Karrie Crouse & Will Joines, Screenplay – Karrie Crouse, Producers – Lucas Joaquin & Alix Madigan-Yorkin, Photography – Zoe White, Music – Colin Stetson, Visual Effects – Bot VFX (Supervisor – Sean Pollack) & Zoic Studios (Supervisor – Richard Patterson), Special Effects Supervisor – Werner Hahnlein, Production Design – Tim Grimes. Production Company – Mad Dog Films/Secret Engine.
Cast
Sarah Paulson (Margaret Bellum), Amiah Miller (Rose Bellum), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Wallace Grady), Alona Jane Robbins (Ollie Bellum), Annaleigh Ashford (Esther Smith), Aaron Shriver (Sheriff Bell)
Plot
The Oklahoma Panhandle, 1933. Margaret Bellum lives on a farm with her two daughters, the teenage Rose and the deafmute Ollie, while her husband is away with work. All around, the house is besieged by dust storms and they have to block every crack against the sand getting in. It begins to wear on their minds. Ollie insists she sees a figure she calls The Grey Man from a book of folklore. Margaret then discovers Wallace Grady hiding in the barn. He is an itinerant preacher who says that he is a faith healer and claims to know her husband. Margaret grudgingly allows Grady to stay in the barn but finds that all is not as it seems. Meanwhile, she begins to wonder if the Grey Man is real and taunting her in her sleep.
Hold Your Breath was a feature-length directorial debut for Karrie Crouse and Will Joines who had previously made several short films. Of the two, Crouse’s most substantial credit was as a staff writer and having written eight episodes of tv’s Westworld (2016-22). The film was selected for workshopping at Sundance.
The film that Hold Your Breath causes you to draw immediate comparison to is The Wind (2018) that featured Caitlin Gerard as a woman on the American frontier living alone in a cabin in the middle of a desert plain while her husband is away and imagining that she is seeing demons in the wind, although we could never be sure if these are real or in her mentally decaying state of mind. There was also the Spanish-made The Wasteland (2021) with a woman and son isolated at a similar cabin on a plain fearing a monster outside that just as easily may all be imagined. All three films make great contrast between the wide open plain, people isolated in a cabin and the belief that maybe there is something supernatural out there, which could just as equally all be inside their heads. You could stretch to also make comparisons to After Midnight (2019) with Jeremy Gardner falling apart after a relationship breakup and thinking there is a monster outside his door.
About half-an-hour in, Hold Your Breath becomes a Mysterious Stranger film. There is quite a body of these ranging back to Teorema (1968), The Shout (1978), Brimstone and Treacle (1982), That Eye, The Sky (1994), Visitor Q (2001), Outside Satan (2011), Borgman (2013) and others. In these, a mysterious stranger enters a household where they are an ambiguous and uncertain figure. In frequent genre offerings, the strangers come with the offer of the miraculous but you cannot be certain whether they are on the side of the angels or devils. Ebon Moss-Bachrach enters the film as a preacher – where the film takes on distinct overtones of The Night of the Hunter (1955) – where he has knowhow to save them and possibly also faith healing hands. Although this Mysterious Stranger aspect is misleading – Moss-Bachrach enters in the second act, seems to become a major player and then abruptly exits following a shock twist revelation.
Thereafter, Hold Your Breath goes back to what it started as and develops a considerably haunted atmosphere that sits in a place of The Ambiguously Fantastic between the threat of the enigmatic Grey Man or else whether these are things are imagined amidst the overwhelming dust storms and the fraying isolation. There then comes the quite shocking twist revelation [PLOT SPOILERS] near the end that there is no Grey Man, that everything that can be attributed to a fugue state on the part of a sleepwalking Sarah Paulson. It reaches quite a seat-edge scene with Paulson in one of her fugues thinking she is holding the shotgun to Ebon Moss-Bachrach who keeps flickering back and forward between Amiah Miller, pleading that this is all an illusion.
Trailer here