Hold Your Breath is an achingly beautiful film that resonates in many powerful ways. While hitting many of the necessary tropes of psychological horror, it’s the incredible acting performances that hook you and won’t let you escape – even when it’s hard to breathe.
Set in Oklahoma in the 1930s Dust Bowl, famine, disease and death abound. But for Margaret (Sarah Paulson), and her two daughters, 12-year-old Rose (Amiah Miller) and 7-year-old Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins) who’s deaf, it’s not just the pervasive dust that’s threatening their lives, but something much more sinister. Even when the mysterious stranger Wallace (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) shows up menacingly in the night, the film asks: could the mother-daughter bond be the most dangerous threat of all?
Written by Karrie Crouse, best known for TV’s Westworld, and directed by Crouse and Will Joines, the movie seems like a dark fable inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic, when just breathing the air might put your life at risk. But surprisingly (and eerily), the screenplay was written before the pandemic even started. Crouse says the inspiration for the film actually came from watching the Ken Burns documentary The Dust Bowl.
"You see these images of this decimated landscape, and these towering walls of dust and you heard first person accounts of what it felt like to have that Sisyphean task of stopping the dust from worming its way into your house through every little crack. It was so visceral. I just started to think this could make for a really cool setting for something in the psychological horror realm," says Crouse.
As if the dust isn’t enough to drive Margaret mad, her husband has left the home to take much needed employment out of town and she’s struggling mentally after the death of her youngest daughter Ada from scarlet fever. Her grief has caused her to hallucinate and sleepwalk, which she’s trying to curtail by taking sleeping pills. As rumors begin to spread through the small community that a dangerous drifter may be in the area, Margaret keeps her shotgun locked and loaded. That’s when Wallace (Moss-Bachrach) appears in the loft of her barn, claiming to be a healer.
Wallace fits the bill as the classic interloper with a secret, but in the hands of Moss-Bachrach, Wallace comes off as pious and enigmatic yet sexy – at first. As much as Margaret wants to protect her girls, she can’t resist his uncanny ability to cure Rose of her chronic nosebleeds. I asked Crouse how to convincingly write a character that goes against their best instincts the way Margaret does in the movie.
"I wanted to really believe this man [Wallace] was someone that Margaret, who is so hyper-protective, could trust. And the only way I thought that could happen is if he made himself kind of small and meek, and a man of God first," she says.
Crouse decided to take inspiration from a real person from history.
"I remember reading about Rasputin, and how he kind of showed up at the home of the royal family [of Imperial Russia] with a promise of helping [Tsarina Alexandra’s] sick children. I thought, that’s the only way Margaret will trust this man," she says.
By adding all these layers, Wallace becomes a character both charismatic and cunning. "People of this time were survivors, and he was a chameleon and figured out what he could do to be trusted by this family. So, you really needed an actor who could play two opposite extremes," Crouse says.
While there seems to be quite a few external threats in this film, the story subtly transitions to Margaret’s internal threat when she stops taking her sleeping pills and begins to hallucinate again due to anxiety and lack of sleep. The lines between what’s real and what’s imagined begin to blur.
Young Rose sees her mom struggling and knows she must step up and be the protector of her younger sister Ollie. Sometimes in life, the person you love becomes the monster and there are few ways out of this type of predicament – something Crouse admits she knows a little about in her own life.
"Personally, having loved ones battle addiction and some mental illness, there are times where you see someone you love and despite how much they’re trying, they’re overtaken by something that’s beyond their control. And it’s frightening to watch. If you’re young it’s a really a vulnerable place to be and there’s no running," she says.
And that is what becomes Rose’s arc near the end of the film.
"To me Rose holds the essential action in the film. When we meet her, she’s still holding onto her mother’s apron strings, letting Margaret mother and take care of her. By the end of the film she has to not only let go of that string tying her to her mother but also she has to move from a child to an adult, then to a mother at the end. She has to be the caretaker to her little sister," she says.
At the time of this interview, Crouse herself was nine months pregnant, perhaps providing deeper meaning to the themes in this movie. I asked her what it’s like to metaphorically give birth to this film while also preparing to give birth to a real baby.
"I feel weirdly close to Margaret, I really empathize. I’ve certainly dealt with anxiety and the feeling of needing to protect the people you love, feeling they are too vulnerable. It’s something I tapped into while writing. But it’s a very frightening, vulnerable feeling in both ways. Unleashing this very vulnerable baby into the world – both the film and the actual baby!" she says.
When it comes to writing psychological horror, Crouse says the peril of what’s at stake has to be grounded in a real fear inside yourself – for multiple reasons.
"I think that if you can make that kind of primal connection with the big emotions going on in the film, it can get you through a lot, because [making a movie] takes a long time. You have to weather a lot of storms in order to get a film made. Or even just to finish that draft!," she says. We’ve all been there. "But I just think that connection will you get to something much more potent and visceral," she says.
Hold Your Breath is now streaming on Hulu.