Sundance 2021 Film Review: John and the Hole
Teen Angst Thriller John and the Hole comes up empty
Our coverage of Sundance continues with Pascual Sisto’s John and the Hole, an arthouse thriller with a style that heavily outweighs its substance. A selection from the festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition, the film has a unique premise and a disquieting atmosphere, but they aren’t enough to save it from its thin main character and plot. Contributor Carolyn Hinds reviews the film. Minor spoilers ahead…
Adolescent life can be confusing, meandering, and very frustrating - unfortunately, that’s exactly what John and the Hole feels like. For his feature directorial debut at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, Spanish visual artist Pascual Sisto and writer Nicolás Giacobone take audiences on a journey to have us understand the angst of a pre-teen boy wanting to be free of his few responsibilities at home and school. And in this intent, Sisto and Giacobone have the right idea. Who doesn’t remember being a teeanger - a time where one would rather be doing anything instead of washing the dishes or cleaning rooms?
At home, John (Charlie Shotwell) spends his days annoying his older sister Laurie (Taissa Farmiga), playing video games, scoping out the groundskeeper Charlie (Lucien Spelman), and being rude or dismissive to his parents Anna (Jennifer Ehle) and Brad (Michael C. Hall). At school he’s disinterested in class and other students, and at home he’s quiet and sullen: Perhaps he’s struggling because he has difficulty with the subjects, or maybe he’s entered that stage of puberty where speaking with his parents about whatever is troubling him would be the last thing he’d want to do. But we don’t know. John doesn’t talk, and John and the Hole rarely comes up with opportunities to explore any interiority. Instead, he gives non-committal answers and makes faces behind his family’s backs - the film doesn’t exactly give us depth or much to go on.
Easing into John and the Hole, Sisto attempts to paint a portrait of teen ambivalence, but the empathizing stops when John (Charlie Shotwell) decides that the best way to live his life the way he wants - without any rules - is to throw his family down a hole. Yes. A hole...in the ground. On one of his many slow and aimless walks through the forest surrounding his large and expensive family home, John finds in the ground a large ditch dug with concrete walls. As is his style, he seems to think nothing much of it...at first. But when their groundskeeper one day passes out from a bite from a venomous garden spider, John becomes possessed by a sinister idea, leaving his family’s gardener sprawled and unconscious without any regard for his well-being. It’s here that it becomes evident that John doesn’t care about anyone, which is the crux - however thin - of the whole film.
“John and the Hole…simply refuses to let go of its tedious arthouse sensibilities.”
After a very brief lecture from his mother about being more responsible, John gets up one night, drugs his family (presumably using the spiders from the garden), and drags them one by one outside to a wheelbarrow, and lowers them down his newly-discovered hole through the use of an ingenious pulley system. The next day, his life of freedom from the care of household chores begins. His family’s emotional and physical torment is just beginning, and so is our bewilderment because so much of what happens during the second and third acts of John and the Hole don’t make an iota of sense.
As Anna, Brad, and Laurie sit in their new prison, all they can do is question themselves and each other. Were they too harsh on John? Did they fail to listen or provide enough support? What did they do that was so horrible to deserve this fate? As time stretches on, and as John’s family slowly begins to starve - either through neglect or intent - circumstances become less and less believable. While John is having the time of his life trashing the house with his classmate and stealing money from his parents’ bank accounts, you wonder how none of the adults who stop by never try to actively look for their friends. Every adult buys John’s weak excuses for why his parents aren't around. The policeman who stops by is dismissed within seconds, and we’re expected to believe that on his many forays into town driving his father’s car, not one single person noticed it was being driven by a child whose head barely clears the steering wheel. To add to the film’s flimsiness is a subplot about a woman and her daughter that feels like it belongs in another story entirely, and while it ties into the main plot eventually, it makes the narrative feel incredibly disjointed whenever they are shown.
There are plenty of issues with the structure and storytelling of John and the Hole, but one shining aspect of the film is the acting by the supporting cast. Michael C. Hall, Jennifer Ehle and Taissa Farmiga all give admirable performances of a family on the brink of collapse when their forced isolation causes them to interrogate who they are as people - it’s just a shame that much of the film focuses on the much less interesting John. In another bright spot, the sound design by Nicolas Becker does wonders for the ambience. Becker’s soundscapes, which were featured in the astounding Sound of Metal from last year, are echoed here, creating a subtle atmosphere of tension and disquiet.
There’s great potential for John and the Hole to be an exciting psychological thriller about a child with sociopathic tendencies (a lá camp classics such as The Good Son or Orphan), but it simply refuses to let go of its tedious arthouse sensibilities. It collapses because the dark elements and tension at the beginning fall victim to the film’s extremely slow pacing, scattered logic, and Shotwell's lifeless performance. As a premise, Giacobone has a potent idea with John and the Hole, and in the end, there is something to be said for how wealthy white people are willing to overlook the signs that their children may be burgeoning sociopaths, but unfortunately, this is explored with barely any depth or meaning.
