Hold Your Breath - Movie Reviews (2025)

Paulson's performance is masterful, but she needs better material to work with.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Oct 12, 2024

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

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

This film, despite its strong cast, seems to struggle with feeling like it needs to stay true to the historical accuracy of 1933 Oklahoma.

Full Review | 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. 

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

Hold Your Breath is a perfect entry to the sleepover genre. It’s spookier than the offerings of some other streaming services (like the Netflix Fear Street trilogy), but likely won’t be responsible for any nightmares.

Full Review | Oct 6, 2024

The effects crew provides so much realism you might be hearing the wind in your ears and, perhaps, tasting the dust in your mouth for hours after viewing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 5, 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.

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

A richly textured performance by Sarah Paulson anchors this slow-burning thriller that lacks a compelling story to match its ominous atmosphere.

Full Review | Oct 5, 2024

Hold Your Breath blends the stuff of paranoid thrillers, supernatural horror and domestic drama into a reasonably effective mashup.

Full Review | 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.

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

Paulson’s portrayal of a mother unravelling with the best of intentions is genuinely distressing... In spite of the very different settings, this aspect of the film is reminiscent of The Babadook, which also features a mother battling a storybook monster.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Oct 4, 2024

Where the movie goes wrong is that it doesn’t build to anything interesting.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2024

There comes a point in Hold Your Breath in which even Margaret’s children begin to wonder if the scary shapes in the dust are real or if their mother is imagining them.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 4, 2024

The scenes between Paulson and Ashford as sisters, trading between who is steady and who is weakening, are especially engrossing.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Oct 4, 2024

the Oklahoma Dust Bowl crisis devastated lives, property and hope and changed the ecology of the prairies. The tension of the constant storms wears deeply, as it would have a hundredfold for those who lived it. a twist on the thriller genre.

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

HOLD YOUR BREATH proves a beautifully shot and slow yet purposeful psychological thriller with a precisely measured shift from clarity to confusion. Every little detail becomes a knock at the door of Margaret's mind.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 4, 2024

Sarah Paulson delivers a solid performance in Dust Bowl-era psychological horror.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 4, 2024

Hold Your Breath gets lots in the sandstorm, confusing a tale of loneliness and hardship with one of a woman slowly unraveling. And it does so with hands full of twists and turns that anyone could see coming.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2024

Despite a distinct atmosphere and soundscape, Hold Your Breath falls off a cliff by doubling down on generic supernatural horror; you will find breathing easy

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 3, 2024