Beware the Grey Man, young Rose Bellum’s storybook warns.
He reduces himself to dust, seeping in through the cracks of your home. And if you breathe him in, he’ll make you do terrible things.
It’s 1933 in Oklahoma. Dust storms have taken over the region, destroying crops and covering everything in a fine layer of dirt. Try as they might, even the meticulous Bellums are unable to keep the dust out. It finds its way in through the boards of their farmhouse into the food they eat and the air they breathe.
Rose’s younger sister, Ollie, is terrified that the Grey Man will come for them during one of the storms. Margaret, their mother, allays those fears, but she worries about what else may be hiding in the dust clouds.
Rumors speak of a drifter who slaughtered a man’s wife and children before that man’s eyes. Margaret’s husband, Henry (the family’s only source of protection), has left to work on the railroads, hoping to earn enough money to save their family’s farm. And the poor air quality is causing children to fall sick with pneumonia.
So when a man arrives in the middle of a dust storm, Margaret is terrified. But then he does something miraculous: He heals Rose, who’s been suffering chronic nosebleeds from the dry, dusty air.
Now, Margaret isn’t sure what to think. Is this man a gift? Or the Grey Man seeping in?
The sheriff in the area where the Bellums live is a good man who’s trying to keep everyone safe. He makes some hard decisions regarding the separation of children from their parents, but he does so as sympathetically as possible.
Rose also makes some impossibly difficult choices in order to keep her little sister safe. The Bellum family clearly loves each other.
Margaret says a prayer early on asking God to protect her family and calm the bad weather. She expresses a strong belief in heaven, hoping that she will join her daughter Ada (her youngest child who died from scarlet fever not long ago) there someday.
That said, Margaret’s faith is sometimes misguided. She begs God to “bruise me, bloody me” if it means He won’t harm her other daughters. Later, when a man says people need the Word of God, she tells him that people need rain, clearly angry that God hasn’t answered her prayers for the weather.
A group of women meets at the church regularly. They often gossip during these outings, spreading rumors, such as a man “melting into dust.” And they discuss a local faith healer.
When a woman’s son dies as a result of neglect, these women say, “the Lord works in mysterious ways.” And the mother of that boy says she still has faith that God must have a plan for her son more important than anything she could understand. This angers Margaret, who calls the mother out for not taking her children’s health and safety more seriously, and she tells the mother that faith isn’t enough to protect their children.
Wallace, the man who heals Rose, claims that he and his four sisters are all faith healers. His father was a preacher, he says, and he carries his mother’s Bible, occasionally reading from it. It’s never proven if Wallace’s gifts are real or simply coincidence, but he threatens to undo Rose’s healing after Margaret threatens him. And he scolds the Bellums harshly at one point, saying that they should show him hospitality in case he’s actually an angel.
Graves are marked with crosses. A man prays before a meal. A woman who had become overcome with grief works with the local reverend to “get her head right,” citing prayer as the reason she’s recovering.
[Spoiler Warning] We learn that the Grey Man is not real, but the tales and rumors about him inspire terrible fear and paranoia.
We see Rose and Ollie (who are sisters) from the shoulders up as they bathe.
[Note: Spoilers are contained in this section.]
Margaret has a recurring nightmare in which she gets caught in a dust storm and chokes to death on the dirt in the air. In real life, the townsfolk find the corpse of a teenage boy who was killed in this manner, his mouth filled with soil. His mother nearly died as well, but it appears he saved her life by placing his coat over her head to block out the worst of the debris. When the mother’s body is uncovered, she wakes suddenly, coughing up dirt.
Some women tell Margaret that a drifter killed a man’s wife and children right in front of him. Later on, they learn there may not have been a drifter at all and that the man may have killed his own family.
We learn that someone working with Henry Bellum was killed by a blow to the head and robbed of his boots. We see a woman lying on the ground with her head split open. A woman fires a shotgun at a man after he threatens her daughter. The carcass of an animal that was killed in a dust storm lies on the side of the road. We hear that the buildup of dirt on a railroad track derailed a train, killing everyone onboard. A woman pricks her finger with a needle while sewing. Several threats are issued.
Wallace grabs Rose by the face as he tries to heal her. Margaret threatens to shoot him during this interaction after Rose begs her to make Wallace stop, but she manages to shove him off instead.
A young boy contracts pneumonia from the amount of dust in the air. His mother says it’s too hard to keep up with cleaning, but it’s later revealed that she has been neglectful. She tells Margaret she had a nightmare that she stuffed a handkerchief into her son’s mouth to stop him from coughing, choking him in the process. She tries to leave Oklahoma with her sons during a dust storm, and her older son is killed as a result. In her grief, she stops doing anything at all to care for herself or her younger son. Finally, her son wanders into town searching for water, and it’s revealed she hasn’t moved from bed for days, causing several bedsores to form on her spine.
Rose reads the story of the Grey Man to Ollie. In it, he burns his wife and five children alive, but he gets caught in the flames himself, reducing him to ash. The story frightens Ollie, who asks if their mother was possessed by the Grey Man after Ada died.
We learn that when Ada passed away, Margaret stopped sleeping. She’d get so tired that she would start sleepwalking and do “terrible” things. Those things are never voiced, but they’re apparently bad enough that Margaret’s doctor ordered her not to sleep in the same room as her daughters, and he instructs the girls to lock their bedroom door at night.
Unfortunately, after learning someone might try to harm her and her girls, Margaret stops sleeping again. She quits taking the sleeping pills prescribed by her doctor and forces herself to stay awake all night in order to stand guard. Sure enough, the sleepwalking resumes, and in this state, Margaret begins to believe the Grey Man is real.
During these episodes, Margaret injures herself several times without realizing what she’s doing. She sews a piece of fabric into her hand. She cuts open her thigh and uses the blood as blush. She claws at a door with her nails, tearing them to the quick.
Margaret also nearly kills her daughters. She’s violently rough with Rose on a few occasions. She sets the girls’ room on fire one night as they sleep. She points a shotgun at a terrified Rose, mistaking the teenage girl for the Grey Man. She dreams that a close friend beheads Ollie (the camera cuts just before the blow lands). Later on, she kills that friend offscreen. (We just see the woman’s corpse.) After that, she kills another friend, stabbing him in the stomach to prevent him from taking her daughters from her.
Finally, in the deepest stages of paranoia, Margaret decides the only way to protect her daughters is for them all to join Ada in death. (This is not the first time she has experienced suicidal thoughts, telling someone earlier in the film that she nearly killed herself right after Ada died.) And she crushes her remaining sleeping pills for them all to take together.
Rose resolves to stop her mother by whatever means necessary. First, she plans to stab her mom. But when Rose notices Ollie watching, she drops the knife, not wanting to traumatize the young girl. Instead, she tells Margaret that Ollie ran out into a dust storm. Margaret runs out to rescue Ollie, using a bit of twine to keep herself tethered to the house so she won’t lose her way. Rose cuts the rope, and Margaret chokes on the dust, unable to find her way back to the house in the storm.
God’s and Jesus’ names are each misused once.
Margaret takes sleeping pills to ensure she rests each night and doesn’t have sleepwalking episodes. A doctor smokes a cigarette as he examines a patient.
A man breaks into the Bellums’ barn during a dust storm, hiding there for days and frightening Ollie, the only one who saw him. He lies to Margaret about knowing her husband, Henry. And we later learn he’s stolen from several people.
Margaret stops taking her sleeping pills because she’s paranoid someone is trying to harm her family—an ironic choice since the pills are meant to protect her daughters from herself. Even when she realizes that she’s sleepwalking and hallucinating, she refuses to take the medicine. She lies to the sheriff about her condition, fearful he’ll recognize her delirium and take her daughters from her.
Beware ghost stories.
Chances are they aren’t real. But they can inspire real fear—fear potent enough to cause paranoia, irrational thinking and harmful choices.
Hold Your Breath addresses the topics of suicide, self-harm and child abuse and neglect—but not in a way that helps us to understand why these things occur or how to prevent them. The film focuses on fear and how it can affect us in adverse ways when we let it overcome us. But again, not in a way that is in any way helpful to audience members.
Margaret claims to be a woman of faith, but it’s clear her belief is misguided. In fact, it seems she only believes in God because she lost a child and wants to see that child in heaven again someday.
Of course, her skewed way of thinking causes her to act rashly. And she very nearly causes irreparable harm to her other two children as a result.
Hold Your Breath doesn’t inspire much hope. There’s no happy ending here. Instead, it’s just a really sad story that shows all the worst things that fear and grief can do to people—and what those things can make them do to the people they love.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
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