Movie Review: 'John and the Hole'

John and the Hole is a haunting and often confounding film. Directed by famed visual artist Pascual Sisto, this unusual story carries echoes of the work of Gus Van Sant, his more meandering dramas such as Elephant or Last Days with the difference being that Sisto has a more distinct purpose. The austere sharpness of the images is given more urgency in Sisto’s work perhaps because he is working in genre, he’s making a thriller as opposed to Van Sant’s medium of formless observation.

Though it is highly unconventional, John and the Hole is, at its core, a thriller. The filmmaking and the lead performance rely heavily on the manufacturing of suspense, the building up of dread in the audience as to what might happen next, and juxtaposing that with the seeming innocence of the teenage protagonist, a lithe and quixotic young man whose vacant eyes make for an eerie mask to hide sociopathy behind.

We have no idea why the lead character, a 13 year old boy named John (Charlie Shotwell), decides to place his parents and sister in a hole in the forest behind their home and the framing of that choice invites anxiety and anticipatory excitement. John is an odd kid. He’s gangly and quiet with an ambiguous quality to him. In many ways he resembles a young Saorise Ronan in the shape of his face and his hairstyle and his ambiguous aesthetic appears built with the intent of making John as mysterious as a 13 year old boy can communicate mystery. John’s actions are deliberate, his choices are calculated, measured, and road tested, and yet his manner is someone who doesn’t understand the boundary he is crossing with his choices and this makes him an enthralling character.

The hole of the title John and the Hole is the remnants of a survivalist bunker that was being built by the previous owners of this family home. The bunker was built deep into the ground but was never finished, it has no stairs or door, no exit. John finds the bunker one day as he is playing with a drone that his father, Brad (Michael C Hall) bought for him, seemingly as a plea to get his son to like him and act like a normal kid.

Seeing the hole for the first time, John is inspired. His eyes light up if just for a moment and we’re left confused as to his fascination until, as if he were slowly pulling a thread from a large tapestry, John’s idea begins to take shape. John knows that his mother, Anna (Jennifer Ehle) takes sleeping pills. In order to determine the strength of these pills, John takes some and uses them on himself to determine how much it would take to knock someone out.

In a chilling follow up, John has an awkward encounter with the kindly gardener employed by his parents. John asks pointed questions about how the gardener is feeling, if he feels tired, if gardening is hard work, and the gardener is polite even as he is clearly puzzled by John’s line of questioning. When John offers to get the gardener another glass of lemonade, chills run down your spine as it becomes clear what John is up to. The following scene underlines exactly what John is up to but it's the dawning realization, what we know about John that the Gardener does not know, that makes this sequence so remarkable.

The incongruity of this scenario, a 13 year old boy playing with ideas more associated with serial murderers, is captivating. Director Pascual Sisto’s style meanwhile is deeply observant, he doesn’t push us toward a reaction, the approach is very hands off and yet that approach itself is engaging, it’s grabby, it forces you into the movie, into the story, actively attempting to understand and make sense of how strange this all is. It's as if Sisto challenged himself to reinvent the thriller genre and made a movie that mines suspense from ambiguity, aesthetic, and active and well observed camera work.

And yet, the story falls back on the classic trope of the thriller: what would you do in this situation? If you were John's parents how would try to get him to listen to reason, what would you do if he did let you out? What would you do if someone else freed you and you had to confront your child about this appalling and frightening choice that he's made. What punishment would such a crime entail? For some these questions might have obvious answers but John and the Hole does nothing to lead you toward how to feel about this and thus uses a classic thriller trope in a brand new way in order to involve you.

There is one deeply puzzling aspect of John and the Hole that I am loath to write about but I feel it must be addressed. I'm troubled in discussing this part of the movie because I am not sure if it is a spoiler or not. Indeed, I am apprehensive because I don't understand this part of John and the Hole at all and I fear I missed something important that might explain where this part of the movie comes from. I'm embarrassed and I don't quite know what to be embarrassed about.

Not long into John and the Hole the movie cuts away from the story of John and his family, before they go into the hole. An entirely different domestic scene is set with a strange little girl and her mother having a peculiar conversation about how the little girl is unwilling to leave her bedroom. The little girl is named Lilly (Samantha LeBretton) and her mother is Gloria (Georgia Lyman). This sequence is oddly paced and the dialogue is off in a sort of dreamlike, Twin Peaks fashion. It ends with Lily claiming that she's learned to dance and her mother appearing almost offended that Lily would lie about such a thing, though there is no evidence that she is lying.

After this brief and strange back and forth, Lily asks her mother to tell the story of John and the Hole. She agrees and a title card appears over a forest background. Then we are returned to John’s story and what he’s about to do. This is odd in many ways but most notably because we’ve already been introduced to the family and to John and established the family dynamic. This shift to the story being told as, perhaps, a parable is strange and unexplained.

It gets weirder though as later in the movie we return to Lily and Gloria and a frantic Gloria tells her 9 year old daughter that she is leaving. She is leaving Lily the house and a large bag of money that, if she is careful, should allow her to live comfortably for at least a year or so. Lily cries and pleads with her mom not to leave and the scene is hard to watch. Not just because of a mother abandoning her child but also because we have no context for this story, it seems to be from an entirely different movie.

Somehow, perhaps because I just adore John and the Hole from an aesthetic perspective and for the performances of this terrific cast, including Samatha LeBretton and and Georgia Lyman, I can’t get mad at the strange inclusion of Lily and her mom. I am stumped trying to explain their function within the movie but I was certainly compelled by them and these brief interludes arrive as welcome breaks from the main story. I can imagine there is something thematically that I am missing here, something that ties these storylines together, but even if they are as random as I describe, I still love this movie.

John and the Hole is a complete original, an authentic and provocative movie, very strange but deeply compelling. Pascual Sisto is a bold director who takes chances and directs his actors extraordinarily well. This is a cast of pros who could undoubtedly deliver under any circumstances but they are aided here by a director with a unique and singular vision, a strong aesthetic, and a keen eye for how to make a thriller feel modern and fresh and still adhere to something that is familiar as a thriller.

Much like how The Green Knight recently reinvented the Arthurian Knight Quest movie and made it feel fresh again, John and the Hole gives the thriller genre a makeover by taking notes of Hitchcock and making them modern and dynamic. Pascual Sisto masterfully moves us as an audience while never planning our reaction for us. It's a hands off approach in the sense that we are never told how to feel about John and yet, the eerie, disquieting feel of a thriller lingers over the movie and the strange central conceit. It all serves to create a deeply engrossing and compelling movie.