John and the Hole Review: Home Alone as a Horror Movie Psychodrama

This review was originally published after ZolaPremiere at the Sundance Film Festival 2020. It has been updated for the public release of the film. The film will hit theaters on August 6.

Logline: One day 13-year-old John (Charlie Shotwell) drugs his family and throws them into a deep well in the woods. Then he makes risotto.

Longest line: Being a teenager sucks, but for John, the transition from aimless child to responsible adult is a crushing existential dread that has left him numb. Suddenly, your math teacher expects you to solve square roots on the top of your head. His older sister (Taissa Farmiga) criticizes him for repeatedly bouncing a ball against her wall. Even the way his parents (Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Ehle) see him as a functional individual, asking him questions about his life and fueling his love of tennis, seems treacherous through the fog of being 13 years old. John takes all of this in stride. But as you go from one meeting to another, something is going through your head. As his mother later says, theorizing about what led her wealthy son to imprison his family in an abandoned bunker, “He asked me what it was like to be an adult.”

John spends little time weighing his decision to leave his family in a hole, nor does he plan the next steps for his new life. Left alone in a fancy house (he’s “Home Alone,” so to speak), the child has unlimited freedom, so obviously he spends $ 100 on chicken nuggets and plays video games. Practice driving the family truck. Call a friend for a weekend party. Buy a big-screen TV to play more video games. John thinks ahead enough to keep up the charade: he says goodbye to his parents’ gardener and waves to his mother’s best friend, but he may be more lost than before. He’s willing to give the situation time, even though his family is slowly deteriorating down a well, to find out.

That John and the hole Trying to do? Visual artist turned director Pascual Sisto, in collaboration with Bird man Screenwriter Nicolás Giacobone resists the temptation to exaggerate his thesis or the psychology behind John’s family terrorism. Instead, the methodical direction, combined with Shotwell’s observational and unaffected performance, leaves the story open for interpretation. (Or rather, probing for the kind of post-movie bar talk that the COVID era has left many of us sighing.) In the film’s press releases, Sisto touches on the subject of “To turn off,” a so-called condition in which privileged children lose the ability to process normal behavior due to being given every opportunity and learning nothing.

That’s certainly part of it, but there is enough ambiguity in the film that eight different chair psychologists walk away with their own diagnoses. Like Yorgos Lanthimos’ Canine and other recent films that build human stories from strange and extreme behavior, John and the hole It has the quality of a Petri dish placed under a microscope. An action occurs, the camera records the action, and the viewer must draw conclusions. Shotwell strikes a difficult balance between being a warm, friendly kid and being dead inside that feels unique in the annals of disturbed movie kids. Hall, Ehle, and Farmiga are also doing their duty, acting completely rational considering the situation. That is, crying out for help at first, then losing my mind as the days go by. I imagine this is really what it is like to be trapped in a hole.

An even stranger subplot / side story, involving a young mother preparing to abandon her 12-year-old daughter by telling her the story of “John and the Hole” and leaving her with a year of cash, adds more mystery to the process. . The detours raise more questions about parenting and the very nature of the story, but again, it’s up to us to figure it out. Giacobone gives the dialogue a poetic touch to make both John’s story and the parallel narrative even more enigmatic.

The quote that says it all: “I was a balloon. A blue balloon. Filled with blue air. I floated. The sun was blue, the sky was blue. No one could see me in the blue sky. It was blue in the blue. “

Does it get there? By resisting any dramatic twist or sensational explanation, Sisto and Giacobone risk making a movie that has nothing for the mainstream movie buff to hold on to. It is a simple realism, but ultimately experimental. The characters have lived lives, but they are clear pawns in a storytelling game. It’s a big “what if?” that will leave many saying “so what?”

But the level of the trade John and the hole contributes to your ideas makes it worth chewing. Paul Ozgur’s photograph of the family’s elegant home and the lush forest that surrounds them recalls the disconcerting quality of Parasite. Caterina Barbieri’s synthetic themes externalize psychodrama. Euro-soul creates an automatic contrast with the American atmosphere. Everything plays, and the viewer’s appetite is more of a variable for its success.

What does that bring us? John and the hole it doesn’t strike like Lanthimos’s surreal larks or Lynne Ramsay’s portrait of a school killer, We need to talk about kevin, but asks provocative questions about modern children and their modern parents. (I guess what I’m saying is that it’s the good version of Modern Family.) Risks arise as society adapts more to the complexity of young people and respects them as more adults than previous generations. Kids are they are still children, and not all young people are on the same developmental path. Money, privilege, and personal philosophy defy evolving norms. Why would a child push his parents into a hole? Why shouldn’t they? Few movies ask the question, to be honest.

The most memorable moment: The mother to her innocent 12-year-old daughter: “This is your life. Make your own decisions. “

John and the hole hits theaters and VOD platforms from August 6.