Review: Hold Your Breath

Maternal paranoia and rural desperation are better captured in films other than Hold Your Breath. - chicagoreader.com

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Despite stunning visual design and a committed leading performance from the always-solid Sarah Paulson, the new Dust Bowl–set psychological horror film Hold Your Breath quickly falls apart amid a paper-thin and suffocatingly repetitive premise. Paulson plays Margaret Bellum, a beleaguered mother stranded in rural 1930s Oklahoma alongside her two daughters, preteen Rose (Amiah Miller) and young Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins). Her husband and nearly all of their tiny farming community's patriarchs are away working construction jobs to send money back to their families.

Around the Bellums, the illness and poverty that the era's famous dust storms have wreaked upon their surroundings are ever-present. When our central trio isn't huddled around grimy gas lamps and trying to protect their home from the elements with spare cloth, they're dwarfed by the gaping desolation..



. Abby Monteil.