John and the Hole
Pascual Sisto's debut feature is a surprisingly toothless psychological thriller with very little on its mind. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) In what will be sure to elicit an insurmountable amount of Home Alone jokes, John and the Hole is a textbook example of a simple premise with potential. There’s John (Charlie Shotwell), a 13-year-old boy whose demeanor straddles the line between budding psychopath and awkward middle school kid. His eyes are so glazed over that they might as well be taped onto his face, and for a while, it’s really quite effective. When it stops making an impact, it’s because it’s clear there’s nothing else behind the surface. One day while exploring the woods by his house, he finds a hole. More specifically, it’s a bunker that was never completed. Soon, he drugs his mother (Jennifer Ehle), father (Michael C. Hall), and older sister (Taissa Farmiga). Then he—you guessed it—drags their bodies into the bunker. He leaves them there for days on end while he lounges around the house, supplying his family with meager amounts of food and water. Whatever cause he has for doing this sits in the dark, and while it would be fine if Nicolás Giacobone’s script didn’t try to fill in the gaps, it kind of does. Worse yet, its attempts to tie fable into metatext are just overt enough to cement how toothless it all really is. Continue Reading →