From writer/director Karrie Crouse and director William Joines comes Hold Your Breath, a psychological horror story starring Sarah Paulson. It is available to stream on Hulu.
Margaret Bellum (Paulson) is a woman left to provide for herself and her two daughters during the 1930s Dust Bowl era in Oklahoma. Her husband has left the family, traveling to look for work with the promise to send money so the family can join him wherever he ends up. Bellum tries to provide and care for her daughters while contending with omnipresent dust which threatens their health. There is an undercurrent of supernatural threat, in the form of the Gray Man, an entity that enter homes and bodies by turning into dust, who can make the possessed do terrible things.
“Is that what happened to Mommy?” the younger daughter asks.
Alongside these threats, both real and imagined, are the real life threats of a new stranger in town and Margaret herself. Never said in so many words, Margaret seems to be suffering from what I understood to be some form of depression and sleep deprivation-induced psychosis. The story unfolds as these threats coalesce and converge.
I enjoyed the movie without being bowled over by it. Everyone in the movie were fine in their roles. Stand out for me was Annaleigh Ashford as Margaret’s sister Esther Smith, who is a good foil to Margaret and demonstrative in all the ways Margaret is not, but seems to wish she could be. Women are the focus of this movie, which is always good to see from a genre that often marginalizes them, both creators and characters.
If you already have Hulu, give it a watch. I don’t know if I would start a free trial just to watch this movie, but you could if you wanted.
The Chimerical Dark 