Hold Your Breath review: horrors of the Dust Bowl

Hold Your Breath kicks off the October horror movie marathon with a story about a mother in the 1930s Oklahoma Dust Bowl who is convinced a malevolent spirit is breathed in with the dust, threatening her children.

Hold Your Breath is what writer Karrie Crouse envisioned as an individual story about living in the Dust Bowl after watching the Ken Burns documentary The Dust Bowl. I saw that documentary, too, and have to say the real images of the dust storms were even scarier than the special effects dust storms in this film. The film is plenty scary, though.

Sarah Paulson is absolutely brilliant in Hold Your Breath, which was directed by Karrie Crouse and William Joines. Paulson plays Margaret, the mother of three girls. The youngest daughter died of scarlet fever. The middle child Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins) is deaf. The entire family uses sign language. Alona Jane Robbins is actually deaf and does a terrific job in this. The oldest girl is Rose (Amiah Miller). The father has gone somewhere to earn some money and mom and the two girls are left alone.

Margaret keeps thinking back to happier times, before the drought, when the wheat was waist high and times were good. Now it’s barren dirt, there’s not enough food or water, the children have bleeding noses and coughing from the dust. There’s no money to escape.

The family has a small community. Margaret’s cousin Esther (Annaleigh Ashford) lives down the road with her family. There’s a small group of women who gather at her church.

Rose reads Ollie a story about a grey man who can turn to dust and seep through cracks to bring evil into people. This frightens Ollie. It starts to prey on Margaret. She doesn’t sleep well and her mental condition leads her to think maybe it’s real.

A strange man, Wallace (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), shows up in her barn. He claims her husband sent him. He has her husband’s jacket and knows all about her and the girls. At first he seems benign, but eventually Margaret is convinced he is the grey man, there to harm her and her children.

This story is a tragedy. It ends on a note of hope, but some terrible things happen along the way.

Like the climate crises we all face right now, the Dust Bowl was the result of human activity. Farming methods that didn’t work on dry lands combined with a lack of rain created a deadly combination of factors that became a catastrophe. Turning a real weather tragedy into a horror thriller seems totally appropriate for this time in our history.

The film is streaming on Hulu. Remember to breathe while you watch it.