Stream It Or Skip It: ‘John and the Hole’ on VOD, a Grim Tale About a Boy And His Family and the Hole He Traps Them In

Now on VOD, John and the Hole is an austere thriller about a not-a-boy/not-yet-a-man who harbors a disturbingly offhanded propensity for physical and psychological torture. It’s the debut feature for Pascual Sisto, whose Haneke roots are showing here — but the name that’s most notable is screenwriter Nicolas Giacobone, a frequent Alejandro Inarritu collaborator who wrote Birdman and Biutiful. Now let’s see if a movie in which a kid traps his fam in a hole is any fun (hint: it’s not).

JOHN AND THE HOLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: John (Charlie Shotwell) is being called out in math class. We only hear his teacher’s voice. She’s either cruel or fed up. John seems to be acting willfully obtuse: He knows the correct answer to the question but won’t say it and when he finally says it he says he doesn’t know why. He’s sort of like this at home, too, but you get the impression his family just thinks it’s the same old eccentric John, or they’re around it so much, they don’t notice it. John plays tennis, and is training for a qualifying tournament that he probably isn’t ready for. He also plays video game tennis over the internet with a friend, and they curse each other out rudely and crudely but shrug it off. Boys being boys I guess? John is 13.

He’s playing with a drone in the woods surrounding his family’s big upper-middle-class home when he comes across some abandoned construction. A concrete hole plummets maybe 20 feet straight down, and he stares into it for a moment. The drone gets caught in a tree and he climbs up to free it but falls down. Cut and scraped with blood running down his arms and legs, he walks home and wades into the swimming pool, as anybody watching this movie cringes with sympathetic pain.

John cleans up and finds some prescription pills in the bathroom and takes some. He’s high and sleepy at the dinner table when he asks his mother, Anna (Jennifer Ehle), and father, Brad (Michael C. Hall), about the hole, and they tell him it’s an unfinished bunker, but then pussyfoot around an answer when he asks why someone would build such a thing. In case there’s a big storm, they say, and it’s obvious that they haven’t talked to him about The Bomb, or maybe paranoia. Later, he’s bouncing a tennis ball off the ceiling over and over and over again, and his older sister Laurie (Taissa Farmiga) pleads with him to stop. It’s driving her nuts upstairs. She snatches the ball out of the air, and on the way out of the room, she kisses him on the forehead. She does that a lot, showing her affection for her brother, and it’s hard to tell if it’s a sweet gesture or a condescending one, like he was a little kitten or something. Probably both.

The family has a gardener, Charlie (Lucien Spelman), who tends to the landscaping, and he ends up being the trial run: John offers to get him some lemonade, then crushes the prescription pills into the glass. Charlie takes a few steps and hits the dirt. Night falls. John checks on Laurie; she’s out. So is Brad. John drags his father down the steps and out the door and puts him into a wheelbarrow. Dawn arrives. Brad, Anna and Laurie awaken at the bottom of the hole, understandably disoriented. John grabs the keys to the Volvo, stops at the ATM (savings balance: $750,000+), then buys a load of greasy fast food, heads home and wolfs some of it down. His family is panicked and desperate in the hole and then John shows up to peer down on them. Help us, go grab the ladder, are you OK, all that. He throws down a big bag of chicken nuggets and a bottle of water. Nice kid you’ve got there.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The White Ribbon.

Performance Worth Watching: Shotwell plays John as clueless on the way to sociopathic, and is convincingly terrifying. But Farmiga plays what’s surely the most sympathetic character, the family member whose tone isn’t jaded and angry, which plays into the film’s primary theme (more on that in a minute).

Memorable Dialogue: “I’ve never been hungry before.” — Maybe Brad’s learning something while starving in a hole for weeks?

Sex and Skin: None, despite the adolescent double-entendre in the title.

Our Take: Welp. This is a grim one, but maybe not as grim as it could be. Is that good news? I dunno. Sisto directs John and the Hole with an austere tone and visual aesthetic; his work is chilly, detailed and artful. It’s Giacobone’s screenplay that lacks clarity and definition — aiming for suggestiveness, he tends to err on the side of vagueness. The characters feel slight, and as John’s family shivers and frets and does what it can to maintain its sanity at the bottom of the hole, I believe we’re supposed to second-guess their pre-hole actions, wondering what patronizing slight might’ve set John off. But the domestic drama is too dry and pedestrian to warrant much dissection.

Giacobone also flings a red herring out there in the form of three scenes in which a mother and a little girl do… things? Yes things, with much vagueness, one of them being a discussion of a story about “John and the hole,” a device presumably concocted to draw out any larger allegorical elements from the primary story, whatever they may be; I feel many of us may be at a loss. While stuck in the hole-dank, Anna and Brad stop before they eat each other alive with accusations of who messed up their kid the most; she reveals that John asked one of his “weird questions” about what it’s like being an adult, and when one makes that transition.

Meanwhile, up above, John has the run of the house, and embraces the freedom, inviting his aggressive moron gamer buddy over for a few darkly funny scenes in which they spit on each other, pig out on ice cream and nearly drown each other in the pool in the hopes that they’ll “see something” (“My friend saw the Virgin Mary in a bikini”). This is the only time the film inspires our disgusted fascination in the making of, I don’t know, a serial killer, I presume? Otherwise, John and the Hole is unsatisfying, never particularly suspenseful and lacking much in the way of substance. Are we supposed to despise John and his family and their wealth? Is this the environment that produces a kid capable of compartmentalization-unto-sociopathy? Dig around in the subtext and you’ll find a few nuggets — an inversion of coming-of-age tropes, maybe a cautionary tale for parents — that don’t add up to much.

Our Call: SKIP IT. John and the Hole isn’t bad, per se, but it’s miserable without much of a payoff. I don’t regret watching it, but neither would I recommend it to anyone in good conscience.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream John and the Hole