‘John and the Hole’: Boy Holds Family Hostage in Polarizing Psychodrama [Sundance]

Critics are shocked, aghast, by Spanish visual artist Pascual Sisto's “John and the Hole” in which Charlie Shotwell an emotionless and psychopathic 13-year-old boy decides to drug and hold his parents and sister hostage in an unfinished concrete bunker.

This was a film originally headed to Cannes 2020 before the event’s inevitable cancelation last year. Set in a post-modern looking house in the Massachusetts woodlands, inhabited by a privileged family of four, whose silent family dinners indicate a coldly detached form of bonding, Sisto’s film immediately presents itself as a controlled, almost too controlled, exercise in futility.

John's father, Brad (a playfully, darkly comic Michael C. Hall), mother Anna (Jennifer Ehle), and older sister Laurie (Taissa Farmiga) are all spiked by the 13-year-old with Anna’s sleeping pills. A static shot framing the bottom of the stairs shows John dragging his anesthetized father's body out of the bedroom, and then outside into a wheelbarrow. Sisto doesn’t show the rest of the family being brought out, but we get the picture when, the next morning, we see them waking up Inside a bunker both alarmed and confused.

The next four days or so, Sisto shows John driving his parent’s SUV, taking out clumps of cash from the ATM, eating massive amounts of junk food and even inviting his friend over to play hours of online video tennis. Oh, and John throws a bag of food and water down the bunker so that, you know, his family doesn’t die of hunger or dehydration.

We don’t really know why John did it, but his emotional detachment, a clear lack of empathy, may be the early signs of psychopathic tendencies. Brad, Anna and Laurie aren’t quite sure how they got there either, they can’t even have a decent conversation about what led to to this eerie moment. There’s a hollowness to it all, and Sisto’s disinterest in providing answers will irk many. I was bewildered, but at time fascinated with Sisto’s mind games.

Sisto adapted the story from Argentinean writer Nicolás Giacobone’s (“Birdman”) own short story “The Well.” The decision to have cinematographer Paul Özgür use a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio enhances the claustrophobic and unsettling feeling of the tale. The slow and meticulous pace of the film may have tested my patience on occasions, Sisto has a knack of deliberately and unnecessarily keeping his countless static shots going for far too long, but Shotwell’s stoic and emotionless performance is so disturbingly rendered that he keeps you glued to his character’s unpredictability. You just don’t know what this 13-year-old kid will do next and that’s an absolutely frightening thought to have as you’re watching the film.

SCORE: B