Why You Didn’t Like … Hold Your Breath

Maybe there’s a hidden group of women who’ve never been told ‘it’s all in your head’. Hold Your Breath is here to reach that niche audience so all women feel thoroughly gaslit.

Hold Your Breath aims to be a fresh breath of air in the horror scene by removing the angsty teens and monsters, swapping them for a more personal story set in 1930’s Oklahoma. However, all it’s really doing is going right back to the 1930’s for a supply of tropes, relying on gaslighting and mental health to carry the win.

The movie’s premise is simple. There’s dust everywhere. There’s a Grey Man, who can get into your house, or even your body, and make you do some intense shit, like murdering your family. As the first act unfurls we get a hint of promise. People in the village have seen a drifter. There’s a mysterious man cribbing in the barn. People see the Grey Man in the dust storms.

Then the originality exits stage left. Sarah Paulson and Ebon Moss-Bachrach can’t save this from being a retro look at a retro problem: gaslighting, and telling women it’s all in their heads. The sheriff will take your kids away because you’re not on enough laudanum! You need meds for sleep, or you’ll do stuff! And you’re too incompetent to know how to feed a cow without a man’s help!

Unreliability is Not Helpful

A core challenge of the movie is that it expects us to believe the imminently reasonable, imminently capable Margaret is … somehow inept. We see her close-knit family is not so tight-knit. One small mistake introduced at the end unravels everything like a Jenga fall. The switch is dramatic and implausible, because it hopes we’ll believe the previously reliable narrator has turned into a cray-cray starfish.

It’s borderline insulting as well. It expects us to question reality, but it misses the real beat that could have made this a brilliant horror movie. Imagine if the Grey Man was real, and he’s got a fetish for stocking up on livers. No one believes Margaret’s Grey Man story, but the bodies pile up. There’s a triumphant end where our heroes banish or kill the Grey Man. Perhaps the troubled drifter Wallace is a secret ally. And in the end, even Sheriff Bell gets on board.

This is not that fucking movie. It just kind of crawls up its own ass in the third act, hoping we’ll be on board with Margaret becoming the villain in the story of her own life. 

MENTAL HEALTH TROPES:

Gaslighting is so overused in this movie, it might as well have its own Netflix special. It feels like Hollywood only knows how to tell this story when it’s a woman who gets to be unreliable. This fallacy that women’s emotions are unreliable is tremendously damaging, both for women and people with mental health challenges. 

However, this is cinema! Movies are where new and edgy stories get to be told. Unfortunately, Hold Your Breath brings nothing new to the conversation on mental health. There’s no Grey Man. There’s no magic in the dust. It’s just an incompetent woman going through a breakdown, and we had to go through 94 minutes to finish with that brain enema.

Villainising the Protagonist

In Hold Your Breath, Margaret starts as the victim. Her husband’s left to make cash. The village gossip about her. And there’s that drifter who’s murdered people! However, through Margaret’s eyes we see her strength, just how capable she is. Whether it’s managing a farm in a drought, or raising two kids with no money, she’s killing it.

Despite killing it, suddenly she can’t deal when a man arrives to help her with her cow. She gets distraught, and somehow fails to know how to use a shotgun. She can’t handle her trauma, whatever that might be. And suddenly, she’s a danger to others, despite being the only person who’s doing anything useful.

It’s here, where Margaret’s transformed into the villain, that makes my teeth itch. Depicting women as crazy is a tiresome trope. Jesus Christ, but if back in the 1930’s they knew how many sleep aids we’d be using in 2024, it’d make their eyes pop out. And it’s our perspective on our society’s regular use of sleep meds that makes Margaret’s fall into lunacy so difficult to swallow.

So, What?

Hold Your Breath could have played a straight game, going for a nice easy horror with a Grey Man murdering townsfolk. Or, it could have explored women’s health more courageously and thoughtfully.

Instead, it leaned on gaslighting and villainising its protagonist. It missed the mark, much like Margaret does every. Fucking. Time. She tries to use a shotgun.

Seriously people, it’s not that hard.