What an utterly remarkable rise Ebon Moss-Bachrach has undergone. From humble beginnings in The Royal Tenenbaums to television regular in Girls, The Punisher, and Andor, all the way to superstar status at the behest of The Bear and the incoming Fantastic Four: First Steps, the world waking up to the talent of Moss-Bachrach. It has been one of the most satisfying developments in the entertainment world in recent years.
However, just because the actor tends to serve the material he’s given, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the material serves him in turn. Such is the case for Hold Your Breath, Hulu’s brand-new psychological horror film that’s made quick work of the streaming charts.
Per FlixPatrol, this day of Oct. 4 has since seen Hold Your Breath claim seventh place on Hulu’s Top 10 overall rankings in the United States, having just released to the platform yesterday. In the film, Moss-Bachrach plays Wallace Grady, a mysterious and threatening figure who torments protagonist Margaret (Sarah Paulson) and her two children, Rose and Ollie, in the middle of a dust storm epidemic in 1930s Oklahoma.
Interestingly, it’s precisely the horror elements in this horror film that lead to its ultimate downfall. Well-acted as it is, the thematic heft of Hold Your Breath is that of parental grief, and how difficult it can be to keep an eye on that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel when going through such a tragedy. The cinematic potential of the dust storms — terrifying and relentless in obscuring everything in sight — could have leaned into such a thing immaculately, and, in part, do so.
It’s a burden that Margaret effectively carries alone; her loving husband Henry is out-of-state, working on a railroad track to provide for his family back home, while she must raise her two daughters after having recently buried a third. This gendered lens of parental strain (the nurturing feminine and the providing masculine) is a fascinating one to explore, and had Moss-Bachrach’s Wallace been utilized as a masculine stand-in for the absent-but-not Henry rather than a villain, Hold Your Breath would have likely been a much stronger picture.
Instead, it commits to the plot of “The Grey Man” (a scary bedtime story frequented by Margaret’s daughters) coming to life, which eventually devolves into an unadventurous descent into madness for Margaret, all without any real creative thrust in its failed attempts to build tension. Indeed, Hold Your Breath is a film that sadly earns its 42% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, despite having been capable of earning so much more if it simply didn’t insist on being a horror film.
But its seventh-place finish is nevertheless indicative of a few victories. The show has topped the likes of crime drama High Potential, long-running police procedural 9-1-1, and Ryan Murphy’s cruise ship medical drama Doctor Odyssey, which today sits at the eighth, ninth, and 10th spots on Hulu’s Top 10 overall charts in the United States.
Unfortunately for Hold Your Breath, these aren’t victories that will last long. High Potential and Doctor Odyssey in particular are both in the middle of their first seasons, so their chart longevity will last well into the rest of the month with every new episode. A feature film like Hold Your Breath, on the other hand, will likely only lose its viewership numbers as its one-and-done release date falls further and further into the past.
Nevertheless, Moss-Bachrach will still fly high, especially since summer 2025 — which will welcome both season 4 of The Bear and the theatrical release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps — still has yet to show its illustrious face.