Television Review | A huge dust storm plagued America for up to a decade, according to a new Disney+ horror film

Hold Your Breath, Disney+.

★★

Corona pandemic in the post-war period, almost any film depicting isolation is sensitively interpreted as some kind of commentary on the pandemic years.

That seems to be the case with the one that premiered on Disney+ Hold Your Breath (2024) case. However, it describes another, also quite right crisis period in history. The film takes place in the 1930s in the United States, when its central parts were hit by drought and huge dust storms. The period known as the Dust Bowl lasted for about a decade.

A year 1933 Oklahoma is in the middle of those dusty and blowing storm winds. Margaret (who has had a really versatile career Sarah Paulson) keeps her family home afloat while husband Henry is away on his money-making trip. For company, Margaret has two daughters, older sister Rose (Amiah Miller) and little sister Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins).

There is a threat from below in the atmosphere. The air is thick with sand, it’s cloudy and hard to breathe. Congested air is not only caused by dust raised by storms. Margaret is not well, and you can read it on her face from the very first scene. Small hints are given here and there about the life of the family.

As storm winds sweep across the prairie, Margaret and the daughters wait for Henry to come home. As they wait, they huddle even tighter in the shelter of their house and isolate themselves. If you have to go outside, you can use the rope tied to the door to find your way back in the dark of the storm.

Psychological in horror, there are several examples of how an external threat – real or imagined – causes fear to grow within protective walls. In Hold Your Breath concreteness is added by Margaret and her daughters’ desperate tinkering around the corners of the house: no matter how much stuff is pushed into the crevices, the threat does not disappear, quite the opposite. Sand and dust get inside. And soon you will feel something else.

An uninvited guest appears at Margaret’s door. Preacher (The Bear -series juicy Ebon Moss-Bachrach) claims to have met Henry on his way and to have come at his urging. Margaret lets the newcomer in, but with doubts. The encounter pushes, forcefully but nevertheless, the film to its long final climax.

Hold Your Breath there is Karrie Crouse and By Will Joines directed from a screenplay by Crouse. Its strength is precisely in the atmosphere and environment, without forgetting Paulson’s shaken essence. Dust storms bring an interesting historical framework to the film, which already has a certain threat and horror.

However, the film does not grow to be particularly original. In fact, many of the choices are so typical of psychological horror that a slightly different approach would have the makings of a parody.

Self nor do I base it on the so-called startle horror, where you always know to expect someone from the darkness to pounce on your face and the quiet scenes to break into a hellish roar. They are like tricks that are pulled from the sleeve, when the actual horror does not come from the atmosphere.

The final solution has, after all, a much-needed distortion, which leaves the mind pleasantly saddened.

Correction 7.10. 5:45 p.m.: Hold Your Breath is a Disney+ movie, not a Netflix movie.