Mark Reviews Movies: JOHN AND THE HOLE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 5, 2021

He's a 13-year-old boy and, apparently, fairly smart. That's kind of what we learn from the opening scene of John and the Hole, in which the eponymous character is interrogated by his teacher about a math problem. The kid knows the answer. The teacher wants to know how he knows it.

He keeps saying, "I don't know," and that repeated answer only makes the teacher more annoyed. We're not entirely certain what John (Charlie Shotwell) wants or hopes to gain from this back-and-forth, dead-end debate, but it's pretty obvious he doesn't want to be having it in the first place.

There's a lot to decipher or wholly divine from Nicolás Giacobone's screenplay, which plays everything so closely to its chest that the entire affair risks suffocation. This begins as a quiet and increasingly unsettling story, in which the teenager, not too talkative but clearly thinking a lot about a lot of things, decides to finally free himself of all the pressures and rules and uncomfortable situations and expectations and belittlements that he experiences every day.

There's the teacher, who won't stop pushing John to say something he either doesn't know, which just makes him look less intelligent than he is, or would prefer not to say, because there's no point rationalizing how he arrived at the solution to the math problem if he knows the answer regardless. There's his family life, which is briefly seen at a scene at the dinner table, where everyone seems to be caught up in his or her own little world. It's silent. No one asks each other how the day went, what the bother might be, or what could be done to help.

John's father Brad (Michael C. Hall) wishes his son a good night, but dad offers an addendum to it. John should check under his bed, like he used to do as a little kid, and maybe that's the thing that causes John to do what he eventually does. He's not a little kid anymore—to be interrogated and talked down to and mocked and ignored. Now is the time to prove it, if not to everyone else, then at least to himself.

Giacobone and director Pascual Sisto (making his debut feature) watch John. He keeps to himself. He plays video games with a friend online, during which he's more talkative than any other time in his daily routine. He practices tennis, hoping that he'll qualify for some upcoming tournament, even though no one in his family seems to care about his dream. His sister Laurie (Taissa Farmiga) even dares to stop him from bouncing a tennis ball off the ceiling, although she does offer a sweet kiss on John's forehead as a way to let him know she's not really that mad at him.

His mother Anna (Jennifer Ehle) doesn't seem to know how to talk to her son, especially when he asks questions like how a person knows when he or she is an adult. Her answer—that people probably never really feel like an adult, only a grown-up kid with more responsibilities—doesn't sit well with John.

Maybe that's when John decided to rid himself of his family. Finding the hole in the forest, an incomplete and abandoned bunker, is just the solution for what to actually do with them.

So much of this movie is simply about observation—watching John make and execute his plan to drug his family and throw them in the hole, examining how John spends his new-found freedom spending a lot of money and playing a lot games, seeing the kid evade being caught when someone starts to become suspicious, witnessing the family members try to survive in the hole and figure out why John would do this to them. It's difficult to tell if Giacobone actually knows or cares about the answer to this riddle. If the screenwriter does know both or either of these things, he's definitely not informing us.

Surely, that's the point, or maybe the point is just that this story exists as a story, for us to inspect and contemplate and determine our answers to the puzzle of John's act of defiance, independence, irresponsibility, and/or cruelty. There's some evidence for that second option, although it doesn't help much.

A subplot, which eventually becomes a framing device for the story of John and his family in the hole, looks at another, younger child (played by Samantha LeBretton), whose frustrated and increasingly unsettled mother (played by Georgia Lyman) tells her daughter stories—including the one with John, the family, and the hole in the woods. The twisted punch line to the framing device is that it's a reversal of John's situation. That makes John's story a parable of sorts—not for us, but for two other characters, whose lives and circumstances are even more mysterious than those of the characters around and inside that hole.

What's the point, then? John and the Hole either doesn't know or doesn't want to exactly tell us. For all of the movie's initial creepiness and increasingly subversive humor (distorting a child's fantasy of being home alone), that unintentional or deliberate uncertainty is far more frustrating than tantalizing.

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