{"id":167050,"date":"2021-01-31T00:16:14","date_gmt":"2021-01-30T21:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/john-and-the-hole-marks-a-tense-vacant-feature-debut\/"},"modified":"2021-01-31T00:16:14","modified_gmt":"2021-01-30T21:16:14","slug":"john-and-the-hole-marks-a-tense-vacant-feature-debut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/john-and-the-hole-marks-a-tense-vacant-feature-debut\/","title":{"rendered":"#\u2018John and the Hole\u2019 Marks a Tense, Vacant Feature Debut"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#\u2018John and the Hole\u2019 Marks a Tense, Vacant Feature Debut<\/strong>”
\nNever has a movie been so forthcoming as to what it is about without ever revealing what it is actually about<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It is, of course, about John and the Hole<\/em><\/strong>. John (Charlie Shotwell<\/strong>) is a spindly boy in late-middle\/early-high school with a staple white suburban swoosh of straight dirty blonde hair that hangs dramatically over his right eye. He doesn\u2019t talk much from what we see, except to ask his parents the occasional investigative life question, as children do, or mutter some fuck yous with all the muted excitement of a teenager beating his friend in a game<\/a> online. But he\u2019s not afraid to talk either. He\u2019s quiet and comfortable with his family and they\u2019re quiet and comfortable with him. That is until they meet the titular hole.<\/p>\n

Brad (Michael C. Hall<\/strong>), Anna (Jennifer Ehle<\/strong>), Laurie (Taissa Farmiga<\/strong>), and John are the 2021 version of the picture-perfect nuclear family living out the American Dream: father, mother, daughter, and son undisturbed by the outside world in their modern mini-mansion on their own plot of land, far enough from others for cries to fade before they find ears. John\u2019s parents, like his sister, aren\u2019t fleshed out characters so much as they are stand-ins for any generic wealthy American family. They\u2019re vanilla in a way that seems requested, restrained so as to not let John\u2019s even more restrained performance be overshadowed.<\/p>\n

After John discovers an abandoned bunker deep in the ground on their property, he decides, seemingly out of nowhere, to drug the other three members of his family and leave them down there, bringing them food and water occasionally while he has the place to himself. What does John do, you ask? Probably what a lot of people would do at that age: wander without restraint, drink from the carton, eat fast food for every meal, drive a parent\u2019s car, play video games, leave trash on the floor — you know, Home Alone <\/em>antics. His life hardly changes, but he has a new autonomy.<\/p>\n

However, John is the type who seems to live primarily in his own head, emitting radioactive levels of sociopathy in his cold, calculating looks alone. He\u2019s the kind of kid who soaks his wounds in chlorine and uses the family\u2019s working-class gardener like a lab rat. He\u2019s bound to do something crazy until, to oversimplify in lieu of spoiling anything, he doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

And so, we\u2019ve already come full circle: what is John\u2019s hole experiment really about? It\u2019s not impenetrable. It\u2019s simply, and not so simply at all, a matter of interpretation. One can imagine several angles. As a coming-of-age story, perhaps it\u2019s about the odd ways in which we learn the world and become ourselves, or it\u2019s meant to be a portrait of privileged youth in its detached, manicured nature. Maybe it\u2019s honing in on the idea that the threat against safety comes from within in a situation where the world is kept out, like a look at the souring effect of domesticity. Or it could be an investigation of autonomy, etc. But if you were to ask me, I\u2019d say it\u2019s empty minimalism and formalism masquerading as depth. Where there should be something to grab onto, there is nothing: a hole (and, of course, John).<\/p>\n

Yet, for as underwhelming as the whole hole situation ends up being, it\u2019s hard to imagine first-time director and acclaimed visual artist Pascual Sisto<\/strong> not getting a second film financed soon, if not immedia<\/a>tely. Sisto molds what is quite literally a story about nothing happ<\/a>ening into a genuinely taut thriller. His direction is superb, keeping even the most frustrated viewers on the edge of their seat until the very end. It doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s just another shot of John playing video games or eating Popeyes, Paul Ozgur<\/strong>\u2019s gorgeous, clean cinematography combined with Sisto\u2019s deft eye and sense of control make for some fine optics. Sisto proves his mastery in the realm of visual art extends in multiple directions.<\/p>\n

There is a strange, underlying sense of intrigue in the subtle oddities of Birdman<\/em> screenwriter Nicol\u00e1s Giacobone<\/strong>\u2019s screenplay, as well, like in the way John\u2019s parents talk to him as if he\u2019s four years old despite him clearly being a teen, or in the vile feeling that it evokes when John parrots his parents\u2019 voices, a practice in mimicry that he hopes will allow him to briefly field phone calls.<\/p>\n

In the sense that everything at work here is wrapped in an enigma \u2013 I haven\u2019t even touched on the debatably intersecting, unrelated plotline \u2013 it might be worth investigating what role John and the Hole <\/em>plays in feeding into the demeaning yet longstanding tradition of vilifying the mentally ill. But it didn\u2019t play that way to me. Whether or not John is on the spectrum remains unseen and is far from a given. As much as one might characterize his actions through that lens, it is just as plausible that he is the bunker-discovering equivalent of a bratty rich kid pyro who, out of sheer boredom and lack of life experience, wants to set things on fire to be entertained by the flames.<\/p>\n

Beware of comparisons to Yorgos Lanthimos, a director with a distinctive style defined by bizarro comedy and utter madness, which are in no way, shape, or form present here. The only overlap is in visual formality, and even then, it\u2019s sparse. Unlike a Lanthimos film, John and the Hole<\/em> inches its way toward the finish, which is to its credit in the way it constructs mood and to its detriment in the way the narrative unfolds. On the bright side, a polarizing work is always preferred to a mediocre one.<\/p>\n

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“#\u2018John and the Hole\u2019 Marks a Tense, Vacant Feature Debut” Never has a movie been so forthcoming as to what it is about without ever revealing what it is actually about. It is, of course, about John and the Hole. John (Charlie Shotwell) is a spindly boy in late-middle\/early-high school with a staple white suburban…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":167051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/filmschoolrejects.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/sundance-2021-john-and-the-hole.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[91239,91490,75817,91491,91492],"class_list":["post-167050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-jennifer-ehle","tag-john-and-the-hole","tag-michael-c-hall","tag-pascal-sisto","tag-taissa-farmiga"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}