THEOne of the most frustrating and common subgenres of the festival film is the genre that is assembled with a high level of mastery, a beautifully wrapped gift that urges us to see what is inside. But once opened, you discover that there is nothing there, a cruel gotcha that disappoints and then aggravates, a problem faced by the overwhelming psychodrama of director Pascual Sisto John and the Hole.
The screenplay, by Alejandro González Iñárritu’s collaborator, Nicolás Giacobone, offers a tempting arrangement. John (Charlie Shotwell) is a 13-year-old blind man who lives with his wealthy family in a luxurious house surrounded by forest. After meeting a nearby bunker, John decides to drug his parents (Michael C Hall and Jennifer Ehle) and sister (Taissa Farmiga) and leave them there. While struggling for a reason, as well as patiently waiting for the rare supplies of food and water, John continues his new life, one without so many rules, but with many more responsibilities.
The crudest way to describe what happens in John and the Hole would be Alone at Home if reviewed by Michael Haneke or perhaps Yorgos Lanthimos in the broadest possible terms, a cool atmosphere successfully evoked but without any thought. or intellect that both filmmakers would also bring to the table. Sisto and the Paul Ozgur cinema have created something visually effective here, from the elegant but soulless house, the camera slides through and around the threatening forests that surround it, a world we are eager to explore with more depth, hoping that such a distinctive style is not just a cover for lack of substance.
In the first act, it’s hard not to be intrigued, an interesting escalation of pushing boundaries as John checks the boundaries of the world around him and tests what he might be capable of, the things he might do, and whether some forms of consciousness could stop him. There are a lot of dream logics that are needed for him to drug his family and physically move them to the bunker, given his age and light structure, but Giacobone intersperses his script with scenes of a mother telling her daughter its a story, indicating to us that everything may not be as it seems. This real early shudder turns into a fear that, in fact, Giacobone doesn’t have much to say or do with his concept, as it was written on the go, an elevator pitch went into production.
Panting a little more to grab to come and go as the story progresses with John inviting a rambunctious friend to the house, both just as fascinated by a morbid game of drowning as they are by the idea of unlimited fast food before the realities of maturity are beginning to emerge, a world of promises and agency, but also a more disordered and cruel one than what came before. The investment begins to fade as the plot turns into boredom and no matter how hard Shotwell might try, he has given so little work that it begins to seem as lost as we feel. As we move toward an accomplishment of the third act, which is remarkably similar to what Macaulay Culkin discovered in 1990, it is clear that we have been deceived, a disappointment to us, and a waste to Ehle and Hall. , both better than the material they have. You’re trying to get up.
As a business card, Sisto shows a secure hand and can be seen trapped to make a “high” art horror, an ease with creating anxiety that will be used much more effectively in the future (although his decision to use a 4: aspect ratio 3 never manages to be anything but an inconsistent and frequently overused trick). For now, he got stuck wearing what turns out to be nothing out of the ordinary, a hole that has been diligently dug, but remains completely empty.