In the last years there has been a tendency of horror movies moving away from those cheap jump scares and going for the psychological aspects of their characters, the social issues that trigger them and how they react to everything, Hold Your Breath tries to do just that but gets too many plots going at once, which doesn’t mean it’s not interesting enough to watch until the very end but I get how many would get tired and just stop watching, it happen to me but I'm the type of guy who must watch until the end unless its very very bad from the beginning. I have to say the movie does succeeds at creating an oppressive atmosphere using its dusty setting and always the threat of storm right at your doorstep, and makes you feel bad for the characters’ isolation and desperation. It’s not the scariest horror movie out there, but it will make you uncomfortable in a way that makes you keep thinking about it after you watch.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12573480/
- Platform: HULU
Rottentomatoes Rating
Maybe one of the darkest parts of American history during the early 1930s, Sarah Paulson new horror movie places us in a town on the verge of being destroyed by dust storms that killed the crops, buildings and brought death and disease, the kind of story that makes you fall into depression right away so I think this movie is not for anyone with a "soft skin" but more for those who enjoy trying to find out why things are that way. This historical backdrop is used by the movie to create a horror story about a mother trying to protect her daughters from something that either might or might not be real, and it combines elements of the supernatural with psychological horror to keep you guessing what’s really going on.
The movie covers several themes including motherhood, grief, isolation and religious beliefs in the edge of crises but despite the fact that these elements come together perfectly, it gives you a story to think about what you would do in the same situation, but another level of horror is the setting itself, how can you even breathe properly because of the dust in the air, how can your kids even live because of all the diseases they could die from, how can you even get help its a mess up life for anyone under this circumstances and environment.
It tells the story of Margaret Bellum played by Sarah Paulson, a mother of two daughters who is in the very edge of losing her third daughter to scarlet fever, only now the survival of her remaining daughters hangs in the balance in a world doom by dust storms and a mysterious preacher shows up on her doorstep. In a world where almost everyone turned to God for answers because there is no other logical explanation and people are desperate for help that is no where to be found reducing the hopes of things to get better to very minimal levels, but Margaret does not she has a different mindset, and going against her community she gets to some dark places inside her mind. When a mysterious preacher named Wallace Grady arrives in their small town, claiming to know Margaret's husband who's out of town working, that just makes their already difficult lives that much more complicated.
They don’t have an easy life, with one cow who’s getting more and more skinny day by day and the risk that a dust storm could kill them at any time, the movie does a decent job of showing how bad off their situation is, their daughter trying to block every crack in the house with fabric to keep the dust out while their daughters spend their time reading scary stories about The Grey Man, a creature whose supposed to travel in the dust and possesses people, its funny how based on their situation even scary stories are develop around it, I guess this is part of humans creativity trying to come up with entertaining content based on their daily life. Really what keeps this movie going are the cast performances, Sarah Paulson is great as Margaret and shows us a mother going slowly mad as she tries to protect her daughters from real and imagined threats. They’re also really good as Amiah Miller as Rose and Alona Jane Robbins as Ollie, who sell you the idea that they’re real sisters dealing with their mother’s increasing paranoia.
The movie attempts to blend various types of horror, soaring from a mother's grief induced psychological terror to the supernatural story of The Grey Man, and while not every element works perfectly, it does well to generate an atmospheric environment that makes you wonder what’s really real and what’s purely in Margaret’s imagination, is this aspect that is the most interesting from the movie how she starts to loose her mind and there are moments she gets lost between the desperate times, with the constant dust storms making you feel claustrophobic and get why someone might start losing it in these conditions, either you are into a big house the fact that you are confine into a perimeter with very low amounts of sunlight will depress anyone even the most wild animal.
It turns out that The Grey Man never existed, everything was in Margaret’s mind as she went through grieving and isolation, in the final scenes she becomes completely paranoid about protecting her daughters and gets lost in a dust storm, as a result showing how she has completely lost her mind. It is a very a sad ending that I think most viewers are not familiar with, feeling grief and isolation can develop into shattering someone’s mind in such harsh conditions, we are usually more familiar to the happy kind of endings or even if the hero dies at least the ones he was protecting are saved but this time around the is no one to safe Margaret.
The Grey Man comes from a children's book that Rose reads to Ollie about a being that lives in the dust and possesses people, causing them to do unspeakable things. Although at first it is only a scary story becoming important as Margaret's mental state deteriorates, the problem begins when she starts to believe The Grey Man is real and it is up to try to harm her family, because that's her own trauma and fears being manifested. The story of The Grey Man is a metaphor for how fear and isolation can mess up the mind of someone desperate like Margaret. Her daughters get to escape on a train to probably meet their dad but since we really don't know if this is all real anymore I would have to assume its a fantasy too, there is also a sense of danger or signs I would say since next to the train dust keeps floating close to them so is it really an escape? even though its real there is a high chance that their future remains the same in another place.
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