Sundance: "John and the Hole" review

by Jason Adams

Titled like a Bible story or a fable of ol' Aesop's (or perhaps it's the start of a dirty limerick), John and the Hole does indeed contain both a John, and a hole. John, played by Captain Fantastic's Charlie Shotwell (and seen just recently doing the disaffected youth thing, and to better effect if you ask me, in Sean Durkin's The Nest), is an absent-eyed 13-year-old sociopath who only seems to spurt to life when playing video-games and screaming obscenities at his best friend via headset. Otherwise he wanders his cavernous home in a daze, occasionally aided by some pills he steals from his parent's drawer...

And during one of these wanderings in the backyard -- he's searching for the ridiculously expensive drone his father (Michael C. Hall) has just gifted him seemingly on a whim -- John finds the other half of our title. It's an abandoned bunker, cement-walled and deep, top open to the world. I guess John and the Bunker would've sounded like a war movie? Anyway John's first thought isn't, "Hey what an awesome fort I could build," it's "I should drug my entire family and drop them down there so I can buy chicken nuggets and awkwardly come on to my mom's best friend by asking her how old she is."

Mom is played by the great Jennifer Ehle, Dad by Hall, and John's sister is the always watchable Taissa Farmiga, whose big familial eyes as ever betray a panicked wildness even in the most narcotized environs. She immediately knows what's up when they wake up in the hole and see the John staring down at them -- it takes his parents a minute to catch up, baffled by the revelation of their son's, you know, state of mind. They'd been too busy with their own tennis lessons and wine collecting to even remember there was a great big open hole in the backyard, much less that their son might be the sort of person who'd drop them down it.

Why does John do what he does? Fables usually have a blunt lesson, a take-away that imparts wisdom to impressionable kids. But John and the Hole undoes such notions right inside itself, injecting at random moments an outside story from the main, where a mother is telling her daughter the story of "John and the Hole" right before... well, let's just say that Alejandro G. Iñárritu's favorite screenwriter Nicolás Giacobone, who adapted his own nine-page story into this film's screenplay, hasn't lost his abiding love of twisted meaninglessness that lurches around straining for profundity. While its big influences are stellar -- Haneke and Lanthimos, twin gods of the cold absurd, loom large -- John and the Hole mistakes rigid construction for substance; it simply falls down and can't get back up.