The setting is Nineteen Thirties Oklahoma, and Margaret (Sarah Paulson) is gasping for air. She’s simply awoken from a dream of lush fields of wheat, of her daughters’ laughter, after which, all of a sudden, an countless cloud of grey mud. It’s a tough minimize from simple respiratory to choking. Maintain Your Breath, the film she’s on the coronary heart of, feels a lot the identical.
It’s Mud Bowl occasions, and Margaret and her two daughters are left on the mercy of large mud storms and a seemingly countless drought, with the inexperienced fields that lured them to Oklahoma a distant fantasy. Although occasions are powerful, Margaret ekes out a decent lifestyle: sweeping and dusting, tending to the lone cow left on the farm, serving to others in her group, dusting extra. However as she tends home, she begins to fret that one thing extra malevolent is threatening her household — and she or he might need to go to excessive lengths to maintain them protected.
Maintain Your Breath’s promise is tantalizing: Mud Bowl horror! When the air itself clogs individuals’s lungs, and the cracked, dry land stretches out without end in entrance of them. The thought that somebody (or somefactor) is menacing what little is left makes the scenario all of the extra scrumptious (at the very least from an viewers perspective).
There’s a transparent COVID parallel right here: For anybody who remembers the sensation of powerless confusion about what air was “clear” and what may trigger the worst cough you’ve ever heard in your life, Maintain Your Breath’s portrait of a girl on the sting ought to really feel extra highly effective than it in the end does. As a substitute, the narrative will get choked by all of the issues crammed in because it goes alongside. There’s the Gray Man legend, the haunted story that spooks the entire household, a couple of man who turns into mud and makes you do unhealthy issues when you breathe him in. There are the lads of the group, far-off at work constructing a bridge (to the longer term, one presumes), leaving the ladies to have a tendency what house they’ve left. There’s Margaret’s already fragile psychological state following the demise of 1 daughter, and the fixed menace of dropping one other to the toxic air. Her stitching circle is sharing grotesque rumors of a violent drifter, whereas Margaret’s shut good friend seems to be dropping her thoughts amid all of the mud and tragedy.
It is a lot to cope with, however as a listing, it appears like a bunch of issues that might doubtlessly really feel in live performance with one another. The failure of the land, the society, the household unit, and even the very partitions of Margaret’s home that may’t preserve the mud out — it’s all related, and each frays Margaret slightly extra. And but Maintain Your Breath feels simply as caught as Margaret: Each of them have an excessive amount of occurring. As varied points of her life disintegrate, the film strikes ahead stockily, selecting away at her consolation in comparatively remoted blocks. By the point all of the storylines converge, the narrative feels too messy to make sense. It’s exhausting to care whether or not the worst menace to this farm is a supernatural vagabond or a psychological break; not one of the storylines can breathe nicely sufficient to hit all that arduous.
As soon as the mud settles, Maintain Your Breath provides little greater than one other trauma as metaphor, lowering the promise of its horror to a extra pat film. It’s an actual disgrace, as a result of beneath all that grime, there’s nonetheless a glimmer of a extra profound unraveling if the story was centered extra exactly. The glimpses we get of Margaret’s psychological anguish make for some chilling particular person scenes — of Margaret attempting to muster normalcy in entrance of her fellow townsfolk, or overlaying her home windows in the course of the day so “it’s a lot simpler to breathe.” However all of the anguish can’t really talk the fear the story deserves. As a substitute, Maintain Your Breath chokes by itself airlessness, and is left barren within the course of.
Maintain Your Breath is now streaming on Hulu.
