For a film about an adolescent boy who holds his family captive in a pit, the bluntly titled John and the Hole could easily veer into psychological horror. At the very least, the conditions are ripe for a tense thriller, as 13-year-old John (Charlie Shotwell) drugs his family one night and deposits them in an unfinished bunker so he can have his run of the place. And indeed, throughout Pascual Sisto’s film there’s an atmospheric tension that thrums just beneath surface of things, a sense of simmering disquiet that’s heightened by effective sound mixing that focuses heavily on incessant insect noises, the whirr of a drone, the intrusive hum of a leaf blower and other sounds from the space where domesticity meets the wild.
However, the transformative effect that the hole in the ground has on John isn’t the supernatural horror that could be found in, say, The Hole in the Ground, nor, of course, the depravity of the pit in Buffalo Bill’s basement. Rather, the hole simply gives John the opportunity to tap into his own inner Kevin McCallister and make his family disappear. While home alone, John gains the agency he lacked as a young teen in an affluent and seemingly emotionally aloof family. Nothing in particular prompts his actions other than the chance discovery of the abandoned construction project itself. Though his exact motives may be unclear, John seems to be living out a childhood fantasy while his mom (Jennifer Ehle), dad (Michael C. Hall) and older sister (Taissa Farmiga) helplessly wallow in their own accumulating filth, depending for days on the scarce provisions he wordlessly drops to them. Meanwhile, he starts driving the family SUV, uses his parents’ ATM card to withdraw wads of cash from an immense bank account, coordinates a meet-up and hangout with one of his online gaming buddies (Ben O’Brien) and even cooks a mean risotto.
Though the family is in a dire circumstance, depending as they are on the whims of a reckless and impulsive child, the reality of the situation setting in for John provides the film with some of its most compelling moments. While he has to run distraction by firing the gardener (Lucien Spelman) and make up some excuses on phone messages, it’s the pop-ins by family friend Paula (Tamara Hickey) that begin to expose the mostly emotionally opaque John’s inner workings. After the initial thrill wears off, John starts to grow lonely and bored, going so far as to futilely attempt to convince Paula to stick around and keep him company. Whenever there’s a swell of menace behind John’s behavior, such as when he holds his friend underwater perhaps a bit too long as they play the “drowning game” in the pool, he seems to pull back before the most severe consequences can manifest. Even though he appears to do these things just to see what will happen, it’s as though he already knows the outcome ahead of time, which he ultimately finds unfulfilling.
There are some leaps made in Nicolás Giacobone’s script. How, exactly, the relatively scrawny John was able to lower three drugged family members some 20 feet down into the bunker without badly injuring them is never explained, and there’s an odd framing device that seems to imply the whole ordeal might be a bit of storytelling in an even more confounding scenario. But these gaps are more than filled in by the unsettling ambience, both sonic and visual, throughout the film. The repetitive thump of tennis balls at practice may indicate the monotony of first-world adolescent problems that prompt John to act out in such a way. Or he may simply dump his family in the hole because, hell, why waste a good hole. The fickleness of youth is as relatable here as it is unfathomable to an adult in retrospect. It’s telling, then, when his mom reveals that John once asked her what being an adult feels like – and how you know that you’ve stopped being a kid. It’s left to the viewer to decide if John trapping his family is his way of trying to find out what it feels like to be an adult or whether he recognizes one can only possibly get away with such behavior during childhood.
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