[Sundance 2021 Review] John and the Hole References Lanthimos and Haneke But Fizzles

On paper, John and the Hole is the kind of festival genre film that should take the world by storm. It’s based on a short story written by Nicolás Giacobone, the screenwriter of this film as well as co-screenwriter of the Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). It’s directed with chilly precision by visual artist Pascual Sisto. The cast is appropriately stacked and its high concept genre plot seems especially calibrated to win critics’ attention. But while John and the Hill evokes the aesthetics and themes of a Michael Haneke film crossed with the slightly surreal work of Yorgos Lanthimos, it fails to evoke more than apathy.

It begins promisingly enough with a static shot of John (Charlie Shotwell) being reprimanded in class for not knowing the answer to the square root of 225. The unseen teacher sighs as he says he doesn’t know, telling him, “Yes you do, John.” John answers with apathetic “okay”s while staring at her offscreen presence with big doe eyes that seem slightly uninterested in this charade. He’s obviously smart. He just doesn’t care. 

“Can I sit down now?”

At home, the apathy extends to his family who’re interoduced at a silent dinner, each person caught up in their own little worlds. His mother and father Anna (Jennifer Ehle) and Brad (Michael C. Hall) quietly stare at their plates while his sister Laurie (Taissa Farmiga) is too busy on her cellphone to notice anything else. All of them are too oblivious to notice what’s happening when John drugs them and drags them to a recently discovered bunker in the woods behind their home until they wake up in the hole with John peering down on them. And when they beg him to let them out or ask why he’s doing this, he stares at them with the same empty kind of silence he gave his teacher. 

With his family stuck in the bunker and at the mercy of his whims, John tries to act like an adult. He drives his parent’s car, takes money out of a local ATM and even, at one point, cooks risotto from a YouTube video. His seemingly only friend Peter (Ben O’Brien) play video games and try to fake drown each other. While this is happening, a meta-narrative involving a young girl named Lily (Samantha Lebretton) and her mother/caretaker Gloria (Georgia Lyman) interjects a couple times, hinting that John’s life is actually a fairy tale being told as a potentially cautionary tale, maybe.

Unfortunately, these brief interjections don’t add much to the story outside of some hilarious moments. One particular interchange between Gloria and Lily had me cackling at the dry and witty humor. This scene connects perfectly to the main story in John and the Hole and I wish there were more moments like that because the characters feel adjacent to a Lanthimos film but miss spark that makes his films unique. It feels hollow; a nicely acted ensemble piece that’s missing a soul to elevate the story. 

It’d be too easy to insert a joke about how this hole is empty and, dear reader, I’m trying. But after finishing John and the Hole, I was left with an empty feeling. Not the kind of emptiness that a nihilistic movie such as The Dark and the Wicked would leave me. Instead, just the kind of general apathy that John, the influenza teen at the heart of the film, constantly exudes. Maybe that’s the point and, if so, then John and the Hole might work for some people. But as the film crosses into its finale and resolution, I was left thinking it was much ado about nothing. A film that seems to want to say something about family and how much we’re willing to forgive, but ends up as empty as the titular hole.