Sundance 2020: ‘John And The Hole’ Is A Cold But Intriguing Coming Of Age Story

We need to talk about John. John and the Hole follows John, an average (if somewhat cold and distant), skinny young white boy. He plays video games, lives in a seemingly ordinary family, and sort of glides through life. He’s a curious young man, musing to his mother what it’s like to be an adult, or wondering with a friend what a near death experience is like. And when he discovers an unfinished, deep bunker in the woods behind his family’s property, he does what any kid would do—he drugs his family with his mom’s medicine and drags them to the bunker.

John and the Hole marks the directorial debut of New York-based Spanish visual artist Pascual Sisto, and it’s an atypical novel thriller about this cold young man (played with stark precision by Charlie Shotwell) who tries on adulthood in the most bizarre way possible. It’s an intriguing thriller, feeling akin to an alternate universe where Michael Haneke directed Home Alone. It’s a film that revels in its open-endedness, it’s silence on motive and consequence, and its provocation of questions that admit few easy answers. It’s certainly worth your time and contemplation.

It’s a film with little by way of exposition (John repeatedly visits his family for food delivery and even then only speaks to them once), but John appears to be trying on adulthood, much like his admitted questioning of his mother on the subject. With his newfound freedom in his newly emptied house, he takes on driving (to classical music, of course), learns to cook risotto, imitates his parents’ phone voices, and continues his lessons. John’s a young man trying life on his own, and sometimes it seems he has to get his family out of the way—before letting them out of the hole, back to being a silent, distant group.

These themes of sudden, frightful adulthood are echoed in a way in the film’s frame story, where a seemingly single mother is first lovingly telling stories to her daughter (including the story of ‘John and the Hole’) before telling the young girl that she has to look after herself, her mother leaving the girl money and taking off unencumbered. The girl doesn’t want to look after herself, but she isn’t left much of a choice. The frame’s connection to the story, like many other narrative threads, is best described as ‘loose and uncertain’.

The cinematography works well to add to the claustrophobia of the film, taking on a more narrow aspect ratio, adding to the barrenness of the ‘hole’ and the clean but empty modernism of the house. It’s the sort of bleakness that Haneke routinely masters, here used to excellent effect as the coldness of the film and its production design match the coldness of John and his actions.

Altogether, John and the Hole is an intellectually interesting film, one hell bent on provoking questions and sidestepping answers. It’s engaging, yet at times frustrating; smart but emotionless. You may yearn for answers, clear chains of cause and effect, to no avail; still, Sisto shows a strong command of tension in a thriller quite unlike any you’ve seen—a worthy cinematic journey to go on.