John and the Hole
**Seen at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
If you find yourself perplexed by the end of “John and the Hole,” I can promise you that you are not alone. The film made by director Pascual Sisto is for pondering rather than quick decisions on how one feels about it, and its characters. For much of its running time, that works to its advantage. And then, the ending comes, and it feels like the bottom falls out, but it doesn’t derail the finished film, but leaves you with more to think about. Whether you find yourself liking it or not from there is up to you.
John (Charlie Shotwell) is the son of an affluent family living in a relatively isolated area, and he doesn’t really say much. We see him at the dinner table with his parents (Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Ehle) and his sister (Taissa Farmiga), and for the most part, he sits around, or goes out in the woods. On one walk through the woods, he comes across what looks like an incomplete fallout bunker. He tells his parents, but that is kind of the end of it until he drugs his family up, and drags them down to the hole, leaving them there. Why? We’re never completely sure of the answer, but a mother seems to be telling the story to her daughter, so that might clue us in on things.
To call the screenplay by Nicolás Giacobone minimalist is an understatement- there’s almost no narrative thrust in this film. I wouldn’t blame that entirely on Giacobone, however; Sisto does almost nothing to help him. There are some interesting visuals, and the Academy framing of Paul Ozgur’s cinematography makes for a nice visual representation of the hole this movie puts its characters in, but it’s one thing to keep things unexplained in a film- it’s another to not explain anything. We can certainly try to infer things from the way the story is told, like how Ehle’s character might be the key to why John has done what he’s done, but that doesn’t exactly answer the role the other mother and daughter have in this film- I thought one thing, but in the end, have no basis of thought in why that might be the case by the time the film’s 98 minutes run out. There are at least two other story threads that could lead this film in a more intriguing direction, but that would involve John being more than just a passively active protagonist, if that makes any sense. It would also involve the film deciding whether it’s going to be a dark thriller that explores the psyche of its main character, or a dark comedy that has fun with the main character’s wicked prank, if you could call it that, on his family. That I sound so conflicted in how I feel this film comes from how frustrating it ended up being for me, when all is said and done. All that being said, there’s some interesting scenes and images throughout the film that are worth a look, even if I cannot recommend it fully.
