THEOne of the most frustrating, yet common, subgenres of festival films is the type that is assembled with a high level of skill, a beautifully wrapped gift that encourages us to see what’s inside. But, once opened, you discover that there is nothing there, a cruel prank that disappoints and then exacerbates, a problem faced by discouraging psychodrama John and the Hole, by debuting director Pascual Sisto.
The script, by Alejandro González Iñárritu’s collaborator, Nicolás Giacobone, offers a tempting scenario. John (Charlie Shotwell) is a 13-year-old boy who lives with his wealthy family in a luxurious house surrounded by a forest. After finding a nearby bunker, John decides to drug his parents (Michael C Hall and Jennifer Ehle) and his sister (Taissa Farmiga) and leave them there. While they fight for a reason, as well as patiently waiting for rare supplies of food and water, John continues his new life, a life without so many rules, but with many more responsibilities.
The crudest way to describe what appears in John and the Hole would be Home Alone if rethought by Michael Haneke or perhaps Yorgos Lanthimos in the broadest possible terms, a cold atmosphere successfully evoked, but without any thought or intellect that both filmed the manufacturers they would also bring it to the table. Sisto and cinematographer Paul Ozgur created something visually effective here, from the elegant but soulless house, through which the camera slides into the menacing forest that surrounds it, a world that we are eager to explore in more depth, hoping that a such a distinct style is not just a cover for a lack of substance.
In the first act, it’s hard not to be intrigued, an interesting escalation of crossing boundaries as John checks the limits of the world around him and tests what he might be able to do, the things he might be able to do and if some form of conscience can stop you. There is a great dream logic that is necessary for him to drug his family and physically move them into the bunker, given their age and fragile structure, but Giacobone intersperses his script with scenes of a mother telling her daughter a story, giving us a clue that everything may not be what it seems. This genuine initial shiver turns into a fear that, in fact, Giacobone doesn’t have much to say or do with his concept, as if it were written on the spot, an elevator speech that panicked in production.
It causes something more to grab to come and go as the story progresses with John inviting an undisciplined friend to come into the house, both fascinated by a morbid drowning game and the idea of unlimited fast food, before the reality of adulthood begins to emerge. , a world of promise and agency, but also more confused and cruel than what came before. The investment starts to fade as intrigue turns to boredom, and as much as Shotwell tries, he has given so little to work that he starts to look as lost as we do. As we move towards the completion of the third act that is remarkably similar to something that Macaulay Culkin discovered in 1990, it is clear that we were deceived, a disappointment for us and a waste for Ehle and Hall, both better than the material they is trying to uplift.
Like a business card, Sisto shows a safe hand and can be seen being grabbed to make a “high” horror of art, an ease with creating malaise that will be used much more efficiently in the future (although your decision to use a 4: Aspect ratio 3 can never be anything but an inconsequential and often overused device). For the time being, he is stuck wearing what turns out to be nothing more, a hole that has been dug diligently but remains completely empty.