103 min | NR | August 6, 2021 | IFC Films
A wealthy family wakes up one day and finds the parents and the teenage daughter gone. Their twelve-year-old son has put them in an unfinished bunker in the woods. He goes home to play house with their lives, and the movie watches him do it.
John is a twelve-year-old boy who lives in a glass-walled modernist house with his comfortable, distracted family. One morning he drugs them and drops them into an unfinished concrete bunker in the woods behind the property. He keeps them alive with food and bottled water and tells no one. Then he returns to the house and runs the family’s life by himself. The film is not a thriller about whether the family escapes. It is a study of a child testing the boundary between dependence and control, and discovering how little resistance the adult world offers.
Charlie Shotwell plays John with a blank, unreadable calm that does most of the work. He never raises his voice and never explains himself. Shotwell makes the absence of motive into the most disturbing thing on screen. Jennifer Ehle plays the mother Anna with brittle dignity, negotiating from the bottom of a pit with a son who holds every card. Michael C. Hall plays the father Brad with a managerial composure that curdles into helplessness. Taissa Farmiga plays the older sister Laurie with a fury that John meets with indifference.
Pascual Sisto directs his first feature with the eye of a visual artist, and it shows in the framing. The cinematography keeps John small inside wide, symmetrical compositions of the house and the surrounding trees. The geometry of the glass house turns domestic space into a vivarium. Nicolás Giacobone’s script withholds explanation as a deliberate strategy and refuses to hand the audience a reason. The score by Caterina Barbieri pulses underneath in cold electronic tones that never resolve into tension or release.
The film commits fully to its chilly surface and never breaks character. That commitment is the achievement and the limitation. The premise promises a slow build toward something, and the movie keeps that build deliberately flat. John and the Hole earns its unease through control and composition rather than incident. It is a precise, withholding object that admires its own restraint a little more than it rewards the viewer for sitting with it.