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THEOne of the most frustrating and common subgenres of festival film is one that’s put together with a high level of craftsmanship, a beautifully wrapped gift urging us to see what’s inside. . But once opened, you discover that there is nothing there, a cruel gotcha that disappoints and then worsens, an issue faced by first director Pascual Sisto’s disappointing psychodrama, John and the Hole.
The script, by collaborator Alejandro González Iñárritu Nicolás Giacobone, offers an enticing staging. John (Charlie Shotwell) is a 13-year-old with dead eyes who lives with his wealthy family in a luxurious house surrounded by woods. After encountering a nearby bunker, John decides to drug his parents (Michael C Hall and Jennifer Ehle) and sister (Taissa Farmiga) and leave them there. As they scramble for a reason, and patiently await infrequent deliveries of food and water, John continues his new life, one without as many rules but with many more responsibilities.
The crudest way to describe what happens in John and the Hole would be Home Alone if it was reimagined by Michael Haneke or maybe Yorgos Lanthimos in the broadest possible terms, a cold atmosphere successfully conjured up but without any thought. or intelligence that both films- makers would also bring to the table. Sisto and cinematographer Paul Ozgur have created something visually effective here, the elegant but soulless house where the camera glides through and around the looming woods surrounding it, a world we are eager to explore. with more depth, in the hope of 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 escalation of pushing the boundaries as John checks the boundaries of the world around him and tests what he might be capable of, the things he might be capable of. to do and if some form of consciousness could stop it. There is a lot of dream logic that is then necessary for her to drug her family and physically move them throughout the bunker, given her age and lightness, but Giacobone intersperses her script with scenes of a mother telling her girl a story, telling us that all may not be what it seems. This real early creepiness however turns into a fear that in fact Giacobone doesn’t really have much to say or do with his concept, as if it had been written on the fly, an elevator pitch panicked. in production.
Tease something more to grab hold of as the story progresses with John inviting a rowdy friend over to the house, both as fascinated by a morbid drowning game as they are by the idea of unlimited fast food, before realities. of adulthood begins to dawn, a world of promises and agency, but also a world more messy and cruel than what had happened before. The investment starts to wear off as the plot turns into boredom and as hard as Shotwell might try he has given so little to work with that he begins to seem as lost as we feel. As we head into a third act making that is remarkably similar to something Macaulay Culkin figured out in 1990, it’s clear we’ve been cheated, a disappointment for us and a waste for Ehle and Hall, both better than the material they are trying to raise.
As a calling card, Sisto shows a confident hand and can be seen getting caught doing a ‘high’ arthouse horror, an ease to create discomfort that will be used much more effectively in the future ( although his decision to use a 4: 3 aspect ratio never manages to be anything but an unimportant and often overused gadget) For now, he’s stuck in dressing up what turns out to be nothing big. thing, a hole that has been diligently dug but remains completely empty.
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