John (Charlie Shotwell) is a curious and troubled teenager from an affluent family.  He is unphased as he is carted around to tennis practice, listening to classical music, and enjoying fine meals with his uninterested, yet perfectly nuclear, family.  That all changes one night when John drugs his family and moves them into the unfinished bunker he discovered in the woods behind their home.  On his own, John now has what he long desired: responsibility, but not only towards himself, for his family as well.   

John and the Hole is a bluntly named but sparsely written character study of the young, titular John.  The film is immediately reminiscent of We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), but without any of the psychological study of the latter.  We see deep into the troubled lives of Kevin and his family as we look back at his upbringing in the aftermath of tragedy, but with John we are only ever in the present.  We never really get a good idea into why John kidnaps his family, yet the script flirts with these ideas as the hours tick by in the hole.  You can tell it wants to be ambitious, but instead opts for cheap ambiguity.  It is a rich idea for exploration from Nicolás Giacobone, the screenwriter of Birdman (2014) which is about a washed-up actor trying to reinvent himself.  John and the Hole is the other side of that same coin; a youth trying to define himself. 

Shotwell does not have an easy job but handles the role of John quite well.  He has a few different masks that he wears throughout the film, and he wears them in such a way that we can tell they are very different characters John is playing to get what he needs.  He runs the gamut from sociopathic in a truly horrifying scene in the pool, to trying to act like an adult when one of his mother’s friends stops by the house unexpected, and sometimes he can just be a kid playing videogames and subsisting on fast-food and takeout.  It is a big ask for any actor to balance these personalities and shift between them from scene to scene, but Pascual Sisto, in his first outing as a feature length director, guides his young talent through the dark material to deliver a performance strong enough to carry the 98-minute film. 

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the rest of that family, though this is more due to the script not giving them much to do before they find themselves imprisoned in the bunker.  Taissa Farmiga finds herself typecast again as a moody daughter, Laurie, but she gives a career standard elementary performance, so she seems comfortable in these lackluster roles.  The script seems almost afraid to give John’s mother, Anna (Jennifer Ehle), too much screentime because it will bring up questions that Giacobone was not prepared to answer.  Finally, Michael C. Hall as Brad, John’s father, is the only character besides John that has the potential to be listed as more than just his role in the family on the call sheet.  He is the only family member we see to have a connection with John that is not just scolding him, hollow as it may be as he tried to buy his son’s love, or at the very least his attention.       

The film does ask us to suspend our disbelief a lot as John’s antics continue to turn from days into weeks.  We can forgive this to a point due to a strange framing device that seems more like an excuse to do whatever the filmmakers want, but this framing is also used an excuse to not hammer down a message with the film.  The moral of the fable is never revealed; are our children growing up too fast? Is this to teach us the importance of family?  The negative effects of the lack of discipline or structure on adolescents?  It is all left open for us to decide, and while cinema has long been used to strike up a debate, the film should be sure to present its ideas clear enough so that we know what it is we are to be discussing as the end credits roll. 

Overall, John and the Hole is still an effective and unsettling piece that fits well into IFC Films‘ catalog of emerging filmmakers.  Its claustrophobic 4:3 ratio and indie-synth score all make this glimpse into the mind of the troubled teen a twisted and frightening one.  Shotwell’s performance, though, is what makes this film work, and with any luck, he has a bright career ahead of him.  This is a film that asks a lot of questions to us as an audience, but it is clear from the penultimate shot that it does not have much interest in answering them, however, at face value it works very well as a lite thriller and the formality shown by those behind the camera is not without merit.