A disturbed kid engineers his own Home Alone in the eerie allegory John And The Hole
There's a touch of Michael Haneke to this disquieting Sundance selection
Film Reviews John
“A kid with more responsibilities.” That’s what Anna (Jennifer Ehle) recalls telling her 13-year-old son, John (Charlie Shotwell), when he asked what it meant to be an adult. You never really stop feeling like a kid, she remembers saying to him, in so many words. You stay the same inside, but your life becomes more complicated. We don’t hear this conversation. We only see Anna relay it to her husband, Brad (Michael C. Hall). All the same, it amounts to the most relevant dialogue in Pascual Sisto’s ambiguous, crisply manicured psychodrama John And The Hole. If there’s a key to the bizarre, disturbing predicament these parents have found themselves in, perhaps it lies in this recounted heart-to-heart between mother and curious son.
Anna and Brad discuss the discussion while sitting maybe 30 feet below ground. They’re trapped in a pit—the abandoned remnants of a bunker that was started but never completed—somewhere in the woods behind their chic fishbowl of a suburban Massachusetts home. As they’ve slowly come to accept, it was their son, John, who put them there, drugging them and his older sister, Laurie (Taissa Farmiga), and then dragging their unconscious bodies into the eponymous hole, which the boy discovered earlier in the week. They’re his captives now, subsisting on the small care packages of food and water he drops into this subterranean prison every couple days. Why he’s done this is a mystery every bit as pressing to his family as their desire to escape.
John And The Hole comes on like a spooky portrait of budding teenage sociopathy, but it resists diagnostic shortcuts. We first meet John as he steps into the tightly cropped opening shot, standing at the front of a classroom to solve a math equation. He gets the answer right but can’t say how; his thought process is a mystery to everyone, himself included. Like the fictionalized school shooters of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, John sometimes plops in front of a piano to play some classical compositions that sound sinister through context, and other times sits in front of a TV for some online multiplayer action, though his game of choice isn’t a violent shooter but a virtual variation on his real-life extracurricular activity, tennis. None of these glimpses into his home life add up to a profile of a disturbed mind; if there’s an explanation for John’s actions, it’s allegorical rather than psychological.
Sisto, a Spanish director making his feature debut with this portrait of unnerving American detachment, has been upfront about his influences. He’s made John And The Hole in the severe, calculated, antagonizing style popularized by Michael Haneke, the exacting Austrian disciplinarian who directed Benny’s Video and The White Ribbon (to name two relevant visions of the young and amoral). There’s something quite familiar, even old hat, about the film’s bag of distancing effects: the hard cuts that jump us jarringly through the story, the coldly elegant compositions (framed in an aspect ratio squashed to the dimensions of the hole itself), the way Sisto often films the action from a literal, voyeuristic distance. The possibility that something (else or even more) horrible is about to happen keeps presenting itself in the slow forward creep of the camera, as during a scene where John plays a dangerous game in a swimming pool with a fellow teen knucklehead.
One could certainly imagine the scolding, scalding wonders Haneke would do with this premise, predicated on something deranged and inexplicable seeping through the cracks in “perfect,” bourgeois family life. But John And The Hole is no empty ripoff, no Caché clone. There’s not just suspense but also unexpected dry humor in the, well, gaping pit separating John’s extreme actions from the banal teenage time-wasting they facilitate. While his family bickers, despairs, and theorizes in their filthy manmade hollow, the boy lives out an exceptionally mild Home Alone fantasy of his own engineering—eating fast food for every meal, driving the minivan, setting up an unsupervised sleepover. The dark joke here is that John barely seems capable of grasping the seriousness of what he’s done; for him, it’s just a means to an end, a way to get a taste of the independence so many kids think they want.
Maybe the operative word is taste. John may be a question mark to his family, but the script by Nicolás Giacobone (Birdman) has a much clearer idea about his motives, about what he’s fumbling to grasp: that indistinct barrier that separates youth and grown-up life. But is John’s simulation of the latter a realistic one? Or is it more like, say, the bubble of college, a twilight zone of freedom sans much responsibility? By the time Sisto and Giacobone introduce a metatextual element that drives home the disquieting thesis of Anna’s talk with her son, John And The Hole has revealed itself to be a film about the impossibility of that transition, whether it’s gradual or harshly sudden. We’re all just kids playing at adulthood. And who among us hasn’t wished we could put some quick distance (horizontal, if not vertical) between ourselves and our family, only to find them exactly where we left them?
32 Comments
I like these allegorical movies, but they’re not for everyone. I remember going to see Jordan Peele’s Us, which I absolutely loved, even more than Get Out. I saw it with two friends, fellow pop-culture-literate nerds whose taste I respect. And we had a spirited little debate in the lobby of the theater because they just Did. Not. Get. It. Where exactly did the Tethered come from? What was their plan? What, exactly, do they want? Etc. “It doesn’t matter.” I said. “It’s magical realism.” “We know what magical realism is,” they said angrily. “But like… how do they eat?” And so on.
I don’t think the issue there is the allegory for your friends, but the magical realism. Because while I can see why you’d call Us a magical realism film, it in now way really presents itself as one. Stuff that works for a viewer in fantastical and fairytale settings doesn’t necessarily work in something more grounded (because you can’t just handwave ‘magic’ or ‘an overactive imagination’ to explain why the Tethered don’t make any sense from soup to nuts.)There’s also the nature of specificity of the allegory, where if you leave things more open-ended viewers fill in gaps themselves, but if you make it too narrow you open up some really weird conclusions for people who follow your movie’s logic to draw (to wit: if you take Zootopia to be expressly about race relations, the very text suggests that biological differences between races are a real thing and the only people who that doesn’t apply to are basically ‘the good ones’.) I don’t think that’s really an issue here, because from the review this functions just fine on a superficial level. Kid sticking his family in a hole is sadly less fantastic than some tragedies that have actually occurred.
For a second I thought you were referring to the U2 album and was extremely confused before remembering that that was Zooropa.
Respectfully disagree… I can handwave ‘magic’ over the Tethered. The details of their existence and specific purpose don’t matter if it’s an allegory, or magical realism, urban fantasy, or or whatever you want to call it. I don’t need to know what the Tethered eat, or how Freddy wipes his ass, or how Jason Vorhees is somehow still alive. Re: Zootopia, I do agree it’s not helpful, or even pertinent, try and find specific one-to-one equivalents for each species… but that just sound like you’re essentially agreeing with me that in these kinds of stories, the details don’t matter and aren’t supposed to. They’re secondary to what everything represents.
These are things that would bother me if I was trying to enjoy a complex murder mystery or hard sci fi or a historical epic. But I guess I just turn off certain skeptical parts of my brain when I settle in for something like Us or Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Spirited Away for that matter.
“I don’t need to know … how Freddy wipes his ass”.You don’t? Oh.*quietly puts away spec script for ‘Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy Gets the Shits’*
Freddy vs. Charmin
his other hand?
If you ever feel like living dangerously, try wiping with your offhand.
For me this is where Us stumbled. If the film simply had the tethered emerging from a few mysterious doors and no attempt was made to give the phenomenon context I would have found the film overall more effective. Instead, the film keeps giving us peeks behind those mysterious doors and every glimpse only raises more questions, and when the film stops dead in the 3rd act to explain itself all the wonderfully built horror, tension, and symbolism bleeds away and I’m no longer intrigued or invested, just left with a whole bunch of frustrating questions that the film clearly doesn’t want me to ask but insists on raising with every scene. It feels as if Peele was under pressure to explain what should have been inexplicable.
Freddy only wears one razor glove, dude.Now as to how Edward Scissorhands wipes, I’ve got nothin’.
Sometimes for certain priorities filmmakers have to handwave over all sorts of things not just magic.I’d argue the most famous example is Citizen Kane. The entire plot is built around the world wondering what Rosebud means because they were Kane’s dying words. But it’s questionable at best whether or not someone heard him say it. A butler claims to have heard it, but if you watch the movie, that doesn’t seem to visually work. The real answer is, it really doesn’t matter and the choices at the beginning were aesthetic choices rather than met to confirm or deny whether someone was in the room.
It’s been a minute, but I think in the looooong explanation towards the end of Us, the government is explicitly mentioned as being behind it all. And since they can’t even make up their minds on eviction moratoriums without deciding to bail for a fun summer holiday, expecting the government to concoct an entire [SPOILER] is magical realism at its most incredibly magical.I dunno, I like a lot of that movie, and there’s an undeniable charge when it hits the gas and shows you it’s not just Lupita and her family. But in exchange for that extra charge, the audience cannot help but start asking questions since Peele got their minds racing.
That little explanation Us gives is actually my biggest problem with it. By attempting to explain some of it, I feel it invites questions about the how and why of the rest of it. If you take that bit out, I’m happy to accept it as a bit of inexplicable magical realism in the service of allegory.
(because you can’t just handwave ‘magic’ or ‘an overactive imagination’ to explain why the Tethered don’t make any sense from soup to nuts.)
We’ve had plenty of movies about dopplegangers that didn’t delve in to where they came from. The idea that there’s just this whole subworld of them is eerie because they’re just THERE.
Yes, I love Us and could not care less how unrealistic it is. It works as a dark fantastical apocalypse.
There was too much explanation for how the Tethered got down there. If you go for magical realism, you don’t explain it at all.
These questions are, apologies to your friends, indicative of a lack of imagination. Why do you need the movie to answer every question for you? Why don’t you try to come up with your own answer? It’s actually a lot of fun and leads to many interesting ideas. That’s what any good story does, it leaves some room for imagination.
Lol. “Us” was dog shit. It literally goes out of it’s way to begin explaining key elements of the tethered and the plot… but stops just short of actually answering anything. That isn’t “magical realism”, that’s poor script writing. That’s an easy way out.
yeah ‘us’ is a collection of concepts and shots and feelings that peele wanted to (excuse the pun) get out, and he collected them in this beautiful, messy movie that he would only be able to make after coming off the his previous success.it felt like peele going ‘i can’t believe they’re letting me get away with this!’ and to some people their reaction is ‘woo! i can’t believe they’re letting him get away with this!’ and others are ‘boo! why is he getting away with this?’and i can appreciate why, depending on how your brain is wired, the reason the movie is ‘bad’ is because it ‘doesn’t make sense’, but i just don’t have that problem with ‘us’. there’s a palpable sense of joy in the filmmaking that comes through for me and smoothes out any of those edges, to me.
Personally, I think the movie makes a great deal more sense than it would even have to, considering it is so much about abstract concepts and feelings.And I’d only call it messy in the sense that it is about messy things, and making these things felt very intensely, and, perplexingly enough, with a lot of precision.I agree that the movie definitely makes full use of its creative freedom, and that, I’d argue, is why its perceived flaws don’t necessarily have to be viewed as such. In its open-ended messaging, there is room for all of it.
This reminded me of The Pit from 1981. It’s fantastic.
Hell yeah, that movie is weird.
Should’ve called it “Joel and the Hole.” It rhymes that way
I was thinking the other day about “The Upside of Anger” and what a weird, icky plot twist it had for a basic, harmless romcom.
Just looked this up.Oh my fucking god.
*googles*HAHAHAHAHA HOLY SHIT.
“Man, they really haven’t left us anywhere to go with the title.” – Producers of ‘John and the Hole’ porn parody
“I’ve got it! How about ‘Johnson in the Hole.’”
“My God, Stevens, you’re a genius! You see that, people? That’s how you get promoted from fluffer to writing staff!”
*quietly slinks off, all dreams of This Ain’t John and the Hole: a XXX Parody dashed*
‘Corn And The Hole’
There’s a whole (sorry) SNL sketch about this, tied to the movies Holes.