Markuss (Damir Onackis) is a troubled young boy.  After the death of his artist father, Markuss’ own drawings begin to take a darker turn as he copes with the loss.  After he orchestrates a prank that leaves Emili (Luize Birkenberga), a young neighborhood playmate, trapped at the bottom of the titular pit, Markuss becomes the target of scorn for the community.  He finds an unlikely friend in an old sailor (Indra Burkovska) who lives just outside of the town and is hiding a secret of their own. 

Dace Puce writes and directs The Pit with help on the page by Monta Gagane and Peteris Rozitis.  The 107-minute film is based off of a collection of short stories by Jana Egle, but instead of opting to treat the storylines as an anthology, Puce creates a narrative tapestry where the three stories intertwine with each other.  It is a mostly successful strategy as the storylines can stand on their own, but the transitions do muddy the trackability of the film as it jumps from groups of characters that are seemingly unrelated to the main plot and also flips back and forth from memory to the present. 

Leading the film is young Onackis in an impressive feature debut.  The film asks a lot of him, and under Puce’s direction, he is able to deliver a great performance.  The role requires a wide range of Onackis who shows us shades of joy, love, anger, and sadness.  Puce’s script and the direction certainly help to highlight his performance as they narrowly avoid the troubled teen trope and create an actual character study on how trauma affects children, but the innate talent shown by Onackis cannot be ignored as this role, simply put, would not work with a young actor who was not already in tune with themselves.   

There are two central relationships that drive the film: Markuss and his grandmother Solviega (Dace Eversa) in addition to Markuss’ relationship with the sailor.  Solviega is a very painful role, a woman who has lost everything and now needs to care for a child who is seen as a blight on the community.  She has a heart of gold as she leads the church choir and helps to run medication to the sailor at the edge of town.  As the film unfolds, we learn about a tangled history between Solveiga and the sailor which creates some contention as Markuss engages the sailor in a friendship of his own. 

Despite the title, the real image at the heart of the film is a stained-glass window that the Sailor was working on and later decided to complete with Markuss in the role of apprentice.  This tender and beautiful relationship is integral to the film, and from it, all the other plotlines take root and grow even more so than is seen with the pit.  Puce uses the dark mystery of the pit to pique our interest but understands that Markuss’ growth as an individual is a far more interesting story to follow.  The window, a visual representation of Markuss’ – and maybe the entire community’s – healing, is keenly hidden from our view with only obscured glances towards it, much in the way Jaques Rivette withheld the painting at the center of La Belle Noiseuse (1991) from the audience until the absolute perfect narrative moment. 

It is not just the stained-glass window that is slowly revealed, but rather the entire script carefully doles out information at precise moments.  The granular reveals can be understandably frustrating at times, but Puce never leaves the audience in the dark for long.  There are no tricks at play here, we learn exactly what we need to and only when we need to know it.  That being said, the ending of The Pit, despite the darker tone of the narrative, ends on a very clean note.  Everything that happens tracks well with the lead-up, but the tonal shift feels like something that worked better on the pages of Egle’s book than it does here on the screen. 

The Pit has a lot to offer for those who seek it out.  It is a small film that swings big and while there are many familiar elements at work here, Puce leads the cast and crew to create a unified work that feels grounded despite some of its wilder moments.  The unity of purpose is what so many of these films live or die on, and for The Pit, everyone involved is clearly working towards that singular vision.  It is not without faults when one takes a step back, but the commitment and the care taken by everyone on and off-screen to bring this story to life is commendable and makes for an enjoyable, albeit uncomfortable at times, experience.