The Hole In The Ground

The Hole Truth

The Hole In The Ground
2019 USA Directed by Lee Cronin
UK cinema release print.

Hmm... not sure how I’m going to tackle this review yet because I know it’s already going to be a short one. If I allow myself to talk about certain spoilers then I will have more to say but, at the same time, I want to see if I can get through this without doing so. Just not sure I’ll succeed in that but... depending on if you see a spoiler warning at the top of this review, above this first paragraph, then I guess you’ll already know whether I was successful or not at that.

So let’s be less spoilerish at the outset and say that, if you are a long time sci-fi and horror movie watcher and you’ve seen the trailer to this, remarkably effective film, then you’ll know The Hole In The Ground is certainly a little ‘inspired’ by a famous science fiction/horror movie of the past. I’ll go one better than that and say that, while it’s not exactly a straight remake of a much loved and oft remade classic, it certainly uses a close variant to the basic premise but, just scales it all back a little and gives it all less scope, to a certain extent. It’s like a modern, minimalist sketch of the original and its many remakes... many of them very good with at least one of them also considered as much a classic, perhaps, as the original version. And I won’t, for those of you who hadn’t figured it out from the trailer, mention its illustrious forerunners anymore because, if you haven’t seen the trailer or if you haven’t been exposed to any of the marketing, you can go in blind and discover it for yourself.

What I will allow myself to say is how brilliantly handled and coming from a fairly different focus this version of it is. The Hole In The Ground has a fairly small cast and is set in a tiny village community. The two principle leads... Seána Kerslake and James Quinn Markey... play Sarah and Chris, a young mother and son who have moved into this community to escape her former relationship. Although there are some other actors in here too... primarily an almost unrecognisable Kati Outinen (who you might remember from various Aki Kaurismäki movies, if you can tie up the way she appears here with how you are usually used to seeing her) and the one and only living legend who is James Cosmo (who has been in gazillions of things from Dick Barton Special Agent to the last Wonder Woman movie, reviewed here)... the two leads pretty much carry the film and, while it’s not quite a two hander, it might as well be. It’s a little like The Babadook (reviewed here) in that respect, although I much preferred The Hole In The Ground, it has to be said.

The film deals with the aftermath of an incident which happens one night when Sarah and Chris have an argument and he runs off into the forest. When looking for him, Sarah comes across a giant crater of a hole consisting of mysteriously shifting earth. When Chris shows up again, things briefly return to normal but it soon becomes apparent that Chris has changed somewhat and the stories of a local eccentric, played by Outinen with Cosmo as her husband, who is alleged to have killed her son many years before after she had spent some time in an institution labouring under the belief that he had been replaced by an imposter, start to weigh heavily on her mind.

Director and co-writer Cronin does his job well with this set up... bringing in elements which allow the audience and, more importantly, Sarah herself to doubt her sanity while also building in little mother/son relationship specifics so that the audience will be able to tell, just as Sarah becomes absolutely sure of her suspicions at one point, that something is more than just a little wrong with Chris since he took off into the woods that night.

And that’s all I’ll say about the story specifics because, like I said, I don’t want to spoil this for anyone. However, I did find the film quite creepy and chillingly atmospheric, which is somewhat unusual for the majority of horror films made every year. As he weaves his tale, Cronin peppers the film with some nice little surreal touches which tends to surprise the audience and catch them off guard. Even from the outset, for example, as the titles come up and a birds eye view camera follows a country road from above in a similar manner to the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining* and its various imitators over the years, instead of the car appearing at the road centre of the screen, Stephen McKeon’s remarkable and, sadly, ‘unavailable on CD’ score to the movie ushers in a second road at the extreme right of the screen that suddenly appears with the expected car on it... which I found quite an effective introduction to the movie. The films is full of similar flourishes, not to mention some great cinematography, including a wonderful visual image (which he uses for two characters) that I can only describe in a spoiler free review as... sequences of ‘ostrich death’ (if you’ve seen the movie you should know exactly what I’m talking about here). The image of this is quite a haunting and striking one and, by the last quarter of an hour of the movie, things get quite ‘early Lynchian’ in their surrealism and I was certainly appreciative of that.

Even the slight disappointment that the film is, indeed, in remake territory is blasted aside when an ‘underground’ sequence which reveals the nature of the ‘creature’ element of this film in a more pointed manner is done in such a stylish and unusual way that you kind of forgive the movie makers for going into this hallowed territory. Also... and this is often the trait of a good movie... it’s a film which doesn’t exhaust all the implications of that reveal and it leaves a good deal to think about in terms of the identity of all of the other characters in the film, by this point. A line said to Sarah by James Cosmo’s character about why he has so many mirrors around the house should set the viewers mind racing by the end of the picture, although the film is at least decisive in its outcome because, by the end of the tale, one or two of the characters are living in a place decorated with lots of mirrors. Which implies the film does, in some ways, have a happier ending than the one the writers could have gone with (and certainly something the writers of the 1970s version of that certain film I am thinking of did).

So, there you have it... The Hole In The Ground is a well made chamber piece of a horror movie but it’s a startlingly effective one and something I would recommend to fans of the genre while also recognising that a larger, general audience would probably also enjoy this one. Certainly one of the best horror movies so far though, I have to keep reminding myself, it is only March. So if you like uneasy, small scale horror with a remarkable mise en scène then this is definitely one to catch while it’s on at your local cinema. Sometimes old things dressed up as new can be just as rewarding as original ideas, it would seem.

*This is not the only reference to Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining to be found in this film... check out the wallpaper Sarah has put up after she's finished decorating.