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Review: The Hole in the Ground
The Hole in the Ground (15)
Ireland 2019 90 mins Dir: Lee Cronin Cast: Seána Kerslake, James Quinn Markey, Kati Outinen, James Cosmo
Tapping into familiar parental fears, changeling folklore and Capgras Delusion (as famously explored in Invasion of the Body Snatchers) in a suitably spooky rural setting, Irish writer/director Lee Cronin’s feature debut does the low-key Babadook-style indie arthouse crossover thing with a creepy kid and a frazzled mother. No new ground is actually being broken here, but it’s very skilfully put together, with a discomforting if occasionally overbearing score, and should appeal to anyone who enjoyed A Quiet Place, Hereditary or even Get Out.
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There’s plenty of old-school foreshadowing in the set-up. We first meet rambunctious pre-teen tyke Chris (James Quinn Markey) pulling faces in a fairground distorting mirror. Soon he and burned-out mum Sarah (an excellent Seána Kerslake) are driving through the wilds of Ireland – cue: Kubrick-style drone shot – on the way to a new start in the middle of nowhere. Dad is absent for reasons that are only hinted at. As they near their destination, they encounter a scary, hooded, mad old crone (Aki Kaurismaki regular Kati Outinen) who, it later emerges, has a very dark secret indeed. It’s not long before the hag takes to headbutting Sarah’s car while warning: “It’s not your boy!” Now any sane person would have turned round and headed right back where they came from at this point, especially as mother and son have by now discovered the bloody great sinkhole in the woods adjacent to their isolated new abode. But this is a horror movie and we’d never have any fun if everyone behaved rationally.
The old house is almost comically creaky. More alarmingly, the little sod comes over all spookily Midwich Cuckoos in public. His behaviour delights the teachers at his junior school but Sarah becomes convinced that he might not be her son after all. Whereas once he was terrified of spiders, for example, he now scoffs them – which is a bit of a giveaway. Clearly the answer to the mystery lies in that enormous, sinister, mud-filled crater that seems to have its own gravitational field. For a while, the film toys with the notion that much of this is taking place in Sarah’s head, as she’s on heavy medication for a curious head wound. But in the last reel, Cronin opts to go for a full Descent/Body Snatchers-style climax that may delight horror enthusiasts but risks disappointing those who were enjoying the unsettling ambiguity.
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