The work of visual artist Pascual Sisto is littered with ominous tedium. He infuses familiar settings with a quiet menace, invisible but inescapable. Sisto’s highly anticipated feature debut, “John and the Hole,” is no exception. The film, which was selected for the last year’s Cannes Film Festival and eventually premiered at Sundance in January, was deliberately conceived as a “contemporary fable,” according to Sisto. “I didn’t want it to be magical or taking place in this other world,” he explained. “It always needed to be anchored in our reality; everybody’s reality.”
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“John and the Hole” is a coming-of-age psychological thriller about an adolescent (Charlie Shotwell) who, seemingly unprompted, decides to hold his family captive in an unfinished bunker behind their suburban home. As noted in our review earlier this year, the movie’s “Twilight Zone” premise and mannered visual style evoke the deadpan tragicomedies of acclaimed Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos.
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The screenplay marks the first solo effort from Nicholás Giacobone, who won an Oscar with Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu et al. for his work on the similarly surreal modern fairy tale “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).” Sisto’s sensibilities are decidedly colder than Iñárritu’s, but the two share an inclination to bend the rules of “reality” to suit their vision. It remains to be seen whether audiences connect with Sisto’s ambiguous storytelling approach.
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John’s parents are played by Michael C. Hall (“Dexter,” “Six Feet Under”) and Jennifer Ehle (“Contagion,” “Zero Dark Thirty”), no strangers to dark material with cold, clinical tonalities. The same goes for Taissa Farmiga (“American Horror Story,” “The Nun”), who plays John’s big sister. Farmiga’s horror bona fides run in the family; she got her start acting for real-life older sister Vera Farmiga, a veteran scream queen in her own right. Selected as part of the canceled 2020 Cannes Film Festival, “John and the Hole” made its world premiere bow in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. The film is now slated for release on August 6 by IFC Films. Watch the first trailer below.
