John and the Hole

JOHN AND THE HOLE   **1/2

Pascual Sisto

2021

IDEA:  Somewhere in suburban Massachusetts, a teen boy drugs his family and holds them captive in an unfinished bunker in the nearby woods.

BLURB:  A coming-of-age fable shot through a Haneke-esque class excoriation, John and the Hole offers up an icy nightmare of adolescent angst and bourgeois apathy. After laying out a rather vague atmosphere of ennui and anomie within the central family unit - indicated mostly through the visual sequestering of characters in the various windows of their glass mansion - the film quietly and obliquely dispenses with its inciting incident. After that, John and the Hole deals less in narrative suspense than in a nagging psychological riddle: what caused John to do what he did? Largely relying on the spookily stolid yet identifiably gawky performance by Charlie Shotwell - complemented by some ham-handed exposition from his parents - the film suggests a childhood psychosocial development warped by upper-class complacency. What does growing up mean when you’re surrounded by material wealth, but not affection? When are you ready to make it on your own when you already have it all? John seems simultaneously to want to prove he can be an adult and to show his parents he craves their care; his situation is provocatively juxtaposed with that of a young girl, whose mother tells her John’s story as a cautionary tale leading up to the film’s most terrifying moment of (non)parenting. Although it could use more development itself, John and the Hole is a moody, intriguing dip into the places where parent-child anxieties simmer.