Hold your breath, your sighs and your yawns. The start of this horror flick is actually quite good, building tension the way a shadow unfolds on a prairie, expanding a mountainous shade until the entire valley is cloaked in darkness. As for the rest of this Hold Your Breath? Well, now you can let out your sighs and your yawns — this wonderful intro crumbles into a pile of dust. As the opening credits warn us, we are entering the Dust Bowl, when Midwest prairies have been ravaged by tornadoes of dirt and sand, a natural disaster of such monumental proportions it inspired John Steinbeck to write about its debilitating effect. Of course, this is a horror movie, so there’s gonna be more than just action scenes of people sweeping their front porches — there’s a supernatural figure called The Grey Man seeping into people’s homes (and no, it’s not Ryan Gosling).  It’s just another ghost that tortures lonely mothers and their children (à la The Babadook), which is not good news for Margaret (Sarah Paulson), who looks after her daughters while her husband builds bridges in another town. In this small countryside village, people do their best to survive the dust storms, tying ropes to their front doors so they can find their way back from a tornado, cleaning their kitchen sinks so they don’t live in a decimated sandbox. In a desaturated desert, death looms over these characters like storm clouds, the feeling of isolation being what draws us into director Karrie Crouse’s opening scenes. While Margaret fends off The Grey Man’s storms, Crouse employs long, ominous camera takes of dust lingering in the air and slow-paced zooms to create a feeling of doomed confinement, as if all these characters are trapped in a snowglobe that trades snow for dust.  Where the movie goes wrong is that it doesn’t build to anything interesting. The introduction of a crazed drifter doesn’t take us anywhere intriguing and Margaret’s maternal fears don’t materialize into audience scares — the buildup just leads to more buildup. There are bursts of violence, to be sure, but the scenes seem to drag on forever without any end in sight. Any tension that was built at the beginning of this movie turns into longing for something, anything, along the lines of a genuine scare or a coherent idea. There are parallels one could draw to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a deadly entity lurking in the air, and Paulson does her best to sell a mother’s fear for her children — a common theme in horror flicks recently. But this is slow paced to the point of tedium, the kind of arthouse horror flick that makes you long for conventional scares that are usually inevitable in the genre.  There’s some tremendous buildup in this movie — some atmospheric scenes make you feel the dust gnawing against your skin — but while those early moments make you hold your breath, in the end you’ll really be holding your applause. The post Review: The Buildup in ‘Hold Your Breath’ Falls to Dust appeared first on LA Weekly.