Sarah Paulson won a Tony Award this year for her lead performance in Appropriate, and has done memorable work in such award-winning art-house dramas as Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (TIFF ’13) and Todd Haynes’ Carol. But many will know her best for her work in chilling genre fare such as American Gothic and American Horror Story. While Hold Your Breath is more ghost story than horror, it benefits from Paulson’s particular talent for the unsettling.

In dust bowl Oklahoma of the 1930s, a mother (Paulson) nears the breaking point as she tries to protect her daughters from deadly windstorms and the impact of her own harrowing past. When the older girl tells the legend of the Grey Man to the younger one, the story slips under the skin of the whole family. The Grey Man is a spirit carried like dust in the wind, breathed in, and never to be shaken.

Written by Karrie Crouse and directed by Crouse and Will Joines, Hold Your Breath perches between the supernatural and the psychological, building suspense through Paulson’s layered performance and an enigmatic turn by Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) as a mysterious, threatening character. Transplanting gothic horror to the story’s parched, midwest landscapes gives the film a deliciously disorienting feel, as if its spookiest elements could be dream or faded memory, or all too frighteningly real.

CAMERON BAILEY

Content advisory: violence