Hulu’s psychological horror is thrilling in its paranoia and insanity

Pa Robert Succi
| Published 28 seconds ago

A long time ago, I told myself that I would stop looking for psychological horror movies that have a “unreliable protagonist” at their core. Unfortunately, I didn’t read my note when I watched last year’s Hold your breath on Hulu. I can’t say I’m mad at myself, but I’m disappointed that I was expecting something different due to the fact that this movie is a period piece set in 1930s Oklahoma after the Dust Bowl took over sometime thriving farmlands that have been destroyed by the elements.

But make no mistake about the refreshing setting as it has all the trappings of a trapeze Hold your breath:

The focus is on a grief-stricken mother named Margaret Bellum (Sarah Paulson), Hold your breath is a by-the-numbers exercise in exploring the paranoia and grief our protagonist experiences as she tries to fight the dark forces intent on taking her children’s lives while her husband Henry (Bill Heck) works on a construction project in Philadelphia.

A familiar build-up

Hold your breath wasting no time introducing a source of evil that will only vaguely make you question the authenticity of Margaret’s experience. But if you’re well-versed in psychological horror, you’ll find yourself sitting with your bingo card of tropes, ticking off the boxes that make this film another generic, almost supernatural experience.

In a house covered from floor to ceiling with a thick layer of dust, Margaret is raising her two daughters, Rose (Amia Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins). Grief-stricken after the death of her youngest daughter, Ada, Margaret takes prescribed sleeping pills to stave off sleepwalking episodes after having a psychotic breakdown before the events of Hold your breath. At first, Margaret seems to have her mental health under control, but that all changes after Rose reads Ollie a horror story about a ghoul that lurks in clouds of dust called The Gray Man.

Gray man

Knowing that The Gray Man is fiction, Margaret writes off her initial fears in Hold your breath as a figment of her daughter’s overactive imagination after reading a horror story. However, Margaret’s imagination gets the best of her when she hears about a tramp who killed her neighbors in circumstances that mirror the events described in The Gray Man.

Shortly after learning of the gruesome crime, Margaret finds a tramp in her barn who reveals himself to be a preacher named Wallace (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).

Margaret is suspicious of Wallace when the circumstances of his arrival do not quite add up. Wallace assures Margaret that her husband Henry sent him to check on his family while he was passing through the Oklahoma Territory. Wallace, who has supernatural healing powers, threatens the Bellum family when his intentions are questioned, prompting Margaret to keep a close eye on any suspicious behavior.

Margaret stops taking her medication to be more alert, seals up the house and lives in a shelter with her daughters, trying to ward off the evil spirit that now possesses her family. As the delirium grows stronger with each passing day, Wallace’s presence becomes a force of evil in the Hold your breath which comes and goes as quickly as the dust storms that destroyed crops in previous years. As Margaret becomes increasingly paranoid, the line between fact and fiction becomes equally blurred as she begins to experience new episodes of sleepwalking.

A solid entry point, but not for the connoisseur

Hold your breath this is one of those movies you want to show your friends who are interested in psychology thrillersbut not yet tired of seeing similar premises in other films of this subgenre. Boasting supernatural elements that seem to corroborate our protagonist’s memory of the events, Hold your breath there are a healthy number of suspenseful moments and jumps that will keep casual viewers on the edge of their seats.

More seasoned psychological thriller fans, however, will yawn once things start heating up, because I guarantee they’ve seen this familiar story involving an unreliable protagonist dozens of times before, but in different settings.

Hold your breath it’s a Hulu Original Movie and you can stream it with an active subscription.