The Hole In The Ground is spooky fun, until its big metaphor swallows the horror
Film Reviews Movie Review
Picture a hole in the ground. Got an image in your mind? That’s not big enough. The hole in the ground in The Hole In The Ground, an Irish horror film that premiered in Sundance’s midnight section last month, could swallow a mansion. Indeed, one might think that it had, were it not in the woods—an enormous, perfectly circular pit surrounded by tall trees right to the lip of its entire circumference, looking like what might happen if god accidentally dropped his bowling ball in that spot. It’s the sort of arresting, potentially hazardous geographical feature that would definitely be mentioned to someone moving into a house within walking distance, which makes it a bit odd when Sarah (Seána Kerslake), a single mother newly arrived in the area, unexpectedly stumbles onto—and nearly into—it while searching for her pre-teen son, Chris (James Quinn Markey). It soon becomes clear that nobody else in this rural village knows about the hole in the ground, and equally clear that The Hole In The Ground will appeal most to those who like their horror movies very bluntly metaphorical.
That’s not to say that director Lee Cronin, who also wrote the screenplay (with Stephen Shields), doesn’t know how to deliver surface-level shivers. The movie opens with a superbly creepy shot following Sarah’s Range Rover from overhead, in which the camera gradually turns upside down, making it briefly appear as if the car is driving straight downward into hell. And Cronin deftly escalates the tension as Sarah begins to notice something slightly different about Chris, immediately after he mysteriously disappears. There’s no particular indication that he fell or climbed into the sinkhole Sarah discovers while frantically searching for him—he just turns up back in his bedroom when she gets home, claiming never to have left—but his manner is subtly different, and he suddenly doesn’t remember the invented game he and Mum have always shared. What’s more, a freaky old woman (Aki Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen), who’s reportedly never been the same since accidentally (?) killing her own child by hitting him with her car, hisses, “It’s not your son!” at Sarah. By the time Chris shoves a heavy wooden table across the room in an abrupt fit of anger, pinning Sarah to the wall, she seems inclined to agree.
Parental anxiety has long been fertile ground for horror, going back to The Bad Seed and The Exorcist, and The Hole In The Ground finds a somewhat fresh angle on the possessed-kid subgenre. Sarah sports an ugly wound on her forehead (usually hidden by her hair), and it’s strongly implied that Chris’ father, who’s never seen and rarely spoken of, physically abused her, precipitating her move to the middle of nowhere. For an hour or so, Cronin wisely lets Kerslake’s quivering, empathetic performance do the heavy lifting; every shot of Sarah staring nervously at Chris communicates her unconscious fear that half of the boy’s DNA comes from a violent man she had to escape, and that Chris might take after him. That’s rich subtext, but Cronin eventually decides that the time has come to dig it up—and he’s already got a convenient hole! The movie’s final third or so functions exclusively as metaphor, yet that metaphor becomes increasingly muddled (and literally muddy), pivoting on Sarah’s decision to stop taking her meds and culminating in a sequence that shows her literally clawing her way out of her psychological issues. This seems to be a growing trend: Under The Shadow suffered from a similarly misguided impulse to explain itself right in the narrative, and so did, to a lesser extent, The Babadook. Real-world relevance has more power in genre fare when the viewer registers it on a primal level, and a subtler movie tends to be scarier, too. It’s tricky business to process painstaking self-analysis and scream at the same time.
16 Comments
So my question is: Is it the Babadook, where the antagonist is a chimera, the product of the mom’s mental instability? Or is it Hereditary, where the mom’s mental instability is the product of an actual antagonist?I’ve got no patience for the former. If I want to watch a sad story of parental mental illness, I’ll go watch a Lifetime movie (note: not really). If it’s the latter, if there’s an actual evil antagonist, I might give it a try.
Saw this at Sundance. Both in its subject and its impeccable gothic style, it reminded me a lot of The Babadook. But in the end it’s not a flattering comparison, because The Babadook was so good at establishing a unique demonic threat and giving it such specific psychological underpinnings, whereas the threat here ends up being pretty vague and generic.
In fact, I thought that was a much bigger problem than the excessive splaininess for which the reviewer faults the film. The movie was plenty “subtle” in the sense that I left the theater not knowing what the heck it was trying to say about this particular mother-son relationship or parenthood in general.
Thanks for the smart review that doesn’t spoil the plot! I’ll temper my expectations accordingly.
I wish I’d clicked on this to discover it was an adaptation of Kathe Koja’s The Cipher.
Thanks for reminding me to read that book! I’m a horror lit fan, but would that perhaps be suitable for a book club filled with non-hardcore horror fans? They all liked my last pick The Fisherman though.
Hmm, that’s a good question. I’d say yes if their literary tastes are broad. But who knows! It’s really good, in any case, and I’ve always wished Koja had more exposure.
Cool! My other choices were maybe Lovecraft Country or Little Heaven, but I think I’m gonna make ‘em read this one. Thanks again!
Standard recommendation for Joe Dante’s criminally underseen The Hole, which also looks at domestic violence but through a more YA-level lens. But that doesn’t make it less effective, it isn’t quite at Paperhouse levels of creepy but it’s well-done and uses its metaphor in smart ways. Also, Bruce Dern is a lunatic and Dick Miller is the world’s oldest pizza delivery guy.
So…the hole in the ground was us all along?
Motherhood was all the holes in the ground we made along the way
The hole represents purity.
“When you gaze long into the hole in the ground, the hole in the ground gazes also into you.”
Hereditary also suffered from this, right at the very end (and I say this as a BIG fan of the film on the whole), in that if it had ended with the “pop” moment, or if everything after that had simply been in dead silence, without the exposition, culminating just in that rising chant… I feel like that would have been a much stronger ending. As it was, it felt a little like the writers gave in to the impulse to over-explain everything to their audience right at the end, which robbed the finale of some of its climactic weight (for me).
I was so turned off by the ending that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I found an article somewhere explaining what the original ending was and, yeah, you’re right.
Ah, I didn’t even know there WAS an “original” ending. It just felt like it would have been stronger if they’d just stripped all the dialogue out after that moment, and left the audience to just make the horrid realisation for themselves.That being said, I still thought it was a GREAT movie.
I liked this a whole lot. Creeped me the fuck out