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Sarah Paulson returns to the horror genre to try and make a dust storm scary. And, somehow, it actually works. This is the absurdly terrifying trailer for Hold Your Breath.
In 1930s rural Oklahoma, Sarah Paulson plays a young mother struggling to keep her kids healthy during the dust storms. It’s a desolate world, as she can only reminisce about her young life when there was green and the air was safe.
Hold Your Breath (2024) – source: Searchlight Pictures
One day, the mother’s church group tells her about The Drifter, a mysterious presence lurking in the dust storms. Legend has it, if you breathe him in, he’ll make you do unspeakable things. And, as the mother’s paranoia rises, she begins seeing shadows of a man lurking in the midst of the dust storms.
Now, the mother must do everything in her power to protect her family from a mysterious threat that may or may not be hidden in the the dust.
On paper, eco-horror automatically feels like a budgetary constraint. It’s easy to make a movie for cheap when grass is the villain. But, to their credit, Searchlight has lifted this 1st trailer to a blockbuster-level event thanks to the large-scale vistas, period-accurate setpieces, and explosive moments from lead Sarah Paulson proving yet again that no one plays a barely-sane woman better than her.
The plot borrows from the best paranoia horror films of the 21st century, with a period twist that makes it feel fresh and new. Additionally, the film’s focus on women feels refreshing, underplaying the “gender commentary” that a lesser director may have shoehorned into a more prominent role in a misguided attempt to appeal to today’s youth.
The trailer, more than anything, takes its goofy parts and coalesces them into a product much smarter than it has any right to be. And it should make for a dark-horse crowd-pleaser this Halloween season.
Directed by Karrie Crouse & Will Jones, Hold Your Breath will release on Hulu on October 3, 2024. The film stars Sarah Paulson in the lead role.
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