'Hold Your Breath' review: Sarah Paulson shines in Hulu's Dust Bowl horror saga

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Set in the Oklahoma panhandle during the early stages of the Dust Bowl, circa 1933, the horror picture "Hold Your Breath" concerns the Bellum family, living in an isolated farmhouse, surrounded by death, decay and terror.

Sarah Paulson plays the matriarch Margaret Bellum; her children are Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins). Their father has left the family to seek employment building bridges. A third daughter's grave sticks out like a lonely thumb against the vast, desolate landscape. The work on the farm has dried up; there's but one remaining cow to sustain everything. And the vast, overwhelming dust storms blow in seemingly every night.

The picture arrives on Hulu from co-directors Karrie Crouse and William Joines, while co-stars also include the Tony winner Annaleigh Ashford and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, two-time Emmy winner for "The Bear."

MY SAY Living alone, in this scary home, with the world outside obfuscated by swirling clouds of dust leaves ample opportunity for a particular form of horror to take hold inside the Bellum family.

It's the fear of the unseen, the unknown and the misunderstood, built here around a storybook that tells the story of the Grey Man, a demonic presence that lives in the dust, breathed in by his victims.

The filmmakers construct the movie around the paranoia that takes root inside Margaret, one built around isolation and the notion that strange and perplexing things must be happening somewhere out there, beyond what can be seen.

Even the most logical and loving among us are susceptible to this darkness. The line between what's real and what's perceived gets increasingly blurred throughout "Hold Your Breath," especially with the appearance of an itinerant preacher named Wallace Grady, played by Moss-Bachrach with a sort of patient, studied menace. 

That's not to mention some obvious but resonant pandemic-era parallels, as a doctor suggests that the Bellum girls wear masks to avoid the dust, and the fear of the sickness that lives within it grows and grows.

So this is a movie with a purpose and a perspective. But after an exhaustive effort to construct this world and establish its parameters, it becomes disappointing to watch it settle into familiar genre routines. Even those of us who welcome this sort of slow-burn form of storytelling would expect there to be some kind of significant or meaningful payoff.

It's a movie about the tone, mood and atmosphere, more so than any sort of single compelling plot development or standout scene. It challenges the audience, in other words. 

If you can accept what "Hold Your Breath" is doing and simply live within its suffocating dread, it offers its share of rewards.

None are greater than the opportunity to watch Paulson deliver yet another standout performance in a career full of them, capturing the whole torrential world of this mother's descent into madness without ever losing sight of the person inside.

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