Movie Review: The Hole in the Ground (English)
There's no two ways about it. The new wave of indie arthouse horror, most of them coming from A24's stable — Hereditary, The Witch, Enemy, It Follows, It Comes at Night, Green Room and The Killing of a Sacred Deer — the few exceptions being Get Out, Don't Breathe and The Babadook — has all but reinvigorated a genre blunted by cheap jump-scares for a vigorous revisionist spin that's more thoughtful, deliberate, emotionally bruising and visceral.
To this trend of elevated horror, as they have now come to be called, joins Lee Cronin's The Hole in the Ground. Building off a template that finds its echoes in The Babadook, this Irish countryside cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere spookfest employs genre elements convincingly, adding carefully calibrated atmospherics to unsettling effect that's both freakish and psychologically traumatising (for the characters as well as the audience), but ultimately doesn't cut deep, resulting in a feeling of mild dissatisfaction, the whole never quite the sum of its parts.
Many a scare film has used monsters as metaphors for trauma — here, it's about a single mom raising a boy all by herself and how kids, in general, can change in unpredictable ways right under our watch — and while Cronin doesn't quite transcend the limitations of this conceit, it's largely mitigated by the spine-chilling qualities of the imagery conjured by cinematographer Tom Comerford.
Stephen McKeon's terror-inducing score is a big help too, as are the performances from Seána Kerslake and James Quinn Markey. The Hole in the Ground ultimately doesn't break any new ground nor does it subvert genre rules, and doesn't even so much as confront the mother-son dynamic in fresh light. But as a straightforward take on horror, succeed it does. Almost.
To this trend of elevated horror, as they have now come to be called, joins Lee Cronin's The Hole in the Ground. Building off a template that finds its echoes in The Babadook, this Irish countryside cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere spookfest employs genre elements convincingly, adding carefully calibrated atmospherics to unsettling effect that's both freakish and psychologically traumatising (for the characters as well as the audience), but ultimately doesn't cut deep, resulting in a feeling of mild dissatisfaction, the whole never quite the sum of its parts.
Many a scare film has used monsters as metaphors for trauma — here, it's about a single mom raising a boy all by herself and how kids, in general, can change in unpredictable ways right under our watch — and while Cronin doesn't quite transcend the limitations of this conceit, it's largely mitigated by the spine-chilling qualities of the imagery conjured by cinematographer Tom Comerford.
Stephen McKeon's terror-inducing score is a big help too, as are the performances from Seána Kerslake and James Quinn Markey. The Hole in the Ground ultimately doesn't break any new ground nor does it subvert genre rules, and doesn't even so much as confront the mother-son dynamic in fresh light. But as a straightforward take on horror, succeed it does. Almost.
Comments
Post a Comment