Oone of the most frustrating but most common subgenres of the film is the kind composed with a high level of craftsmanship, a beautifully wrapped gift that encourages us to see what’s in it. But once it opens, you realize there is nothing, a cruel gotcha that disappoints and then exacerbates, a problem faced by director Pascual Sisto’s overwhelming psychodrama John and the Hole for the first time.
The screenplay, by Alejandro González Iñárritu’s collaborator Nicolás Giacobone, offers a tantalizing setting. John (Charlie Shotwell) is a 13-year-old dead eye who lives with his wealthy family in a luxury home surrounded by bushveld. After encountering a nearby bunker, John decides to drug his parents (Michael C Hall and Jennifer Ehle) and sister (Taissa Farmiga) and leave them down there. As they scurry for a reason and wait patiently for irregular deliveries of food and water, John continues on with his new life, one without so many rules, but with many more responsibilities.
The crudest way to describe what takes place in John and the Hole would be at home alone if Michael Haneke or perhaps Yorgos Lanthimos predicted it in the broadest terms, a cool atmosphere successfully evoked, but without any thought or mind filming both . makers would also bring to the table. Sisto and cinematographer Paul Ozgur have created here visually effective, from the sleek but soulless house that slides the camera through and around to the menacing forests that surround it, a world we would like to explore in more depth, in the hope that such a distinctive style is not just a cover for a lack of substance.
In the first act, it’s hard not to be intrigued, an interesting increase in boundary pressure as John explores the boundaries of the world around him and tests what he’s capable of, the things he can do and whether it’s one or the other. other form is. of conscience can stop him. There is a great deal of dream logic needed to drug his family and physically move him into the bunker, given his age and meager framework, but Giacobone alternates his screenplay with scenes of a mother taking her daughter tell. a story that reminds us that everything may not look the way it does. However, this true early whimsy turns into a fear that Giacobone actually does not have much to say or do with his concept, as an elevator was written in production.
Teasing of something more to seize to come and go as the story progresses with John inviting a tumultuous friend home, both so fascinated by a morbid drowning game as by the idea of unlimited fast food, before the reality of adulthood begins to dawn, a world of promise and agency, but also one that is more messy and cruel than has come before. Investment is starting to fade as intrigue gets bored and as hard as Shotwell tries, he has given so little to work with that he looks as lost as we feel. By the time we realize after a third act that is remarkably similar to something Macaulay Culkin invented in 1990, it’s clear we have a rap, a disappointment for us, and a waste for Ehle and Hall, both. better than the material they had. we try to elevate.
As a phone card, Sisto shows an insured hand and can be seen being snatched up to make an ‘increased’ horror, an ease of creating discomfort that will be used much more effectively in the future (although she decides to a 4 to use). : 3 aspect ratio never succeeds in being anything other than an unimportant gimmick). For now, he is stuck wearing something that is apparently nothing, a hole that has been carefully dug but remains completely empty.