Less successful is first-time feature directors Crouse and Joines’s handle on its genre storytelling...as much as a grounded Paulson commits, this cycle of repetitive fake outs manages to make this unique horror setting feel utterly forgettable.

| Oct 16, 2024

It's a fine example of slow-burn and character-driven horror storytelling.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 9, 2024

For a debut feature, this dustbowl survival flick shows undeniable promise. But committed performances and striking cinematography can’t stop a shaky narrative crumbling at the last. 

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 8, 2024

A sequence of powerful scenes that aren’t tied together with enough tension to make us care. It’s a film filled with moments but no momentum.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 5, 2024

Paulson’s commitment is unwavering, and it’s refreshing to see her in genre material a little more grounded than what the various American Horror Stories have given her, but she’s an actor in search of better material and, sadly.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 4, 2024

Elements of psychological, supernatural, and survival horror are incorporated, yet never coalesce into a cohesive story, despite the film boasting a strong central performance and a commitment to historical detail.

| Original Score: C+ | Oct 4, 2024

Directors Karrie Crouse and William Joines have constructed a bleakly sparse Western where true horror is found in the emptiness of living one’s day-to-day life on the isolated extremes.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 3, 2024

“Hold Your Breath” taps into a national mood of paranoia and escalating anxiety and that makes it all the more chilling, all the more relevant.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 2, 2024

In a genre overly taken as of late with “elevated” trauma scares, its gritty, skillful menace is a breath of fresh air.

| Oct 2, 2024

Sarah Paulson shines in this horror thriller set in 1930s Oklahoma. But the movie's compendium of tired horror tropes does not.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 2, 2024

The film often does too much, reaching for too many different sources for its attempted thrills and chills, which results in a mostly scattered experience.

| Oct 2, 2024

Even as Paulson is putting her all into the film and can firmly grab hold of you at some moments as her strong-willed matriarch comes undone, much like the dust that is floating around the confined setting, it all slips through her fingers.

| Sep 12, 2024