The Hole in the Ground review: this tale of an uncanny child is a decent little midnight chiller
Dir: Lee Cronin. Cast: Seána Kerslake, James Quinn Markey, James Cosmo, Kati Outinen, Simone Kirby, Steve Wall, Eoin Macken. 15 cert, 90 mins
The Hole in the Ground, Lee Cronin’s horror debut, opens with a young Irish mother called Sarah (Seána Kerslake) and her son Chris (James Quinn Markey) driving down a forbidding woodland road, where they nearly run someone over – a crone in a dark cowl, whose face seems familiar. It isn’t the scowling lady from Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, but her exact doppelgänger, Finnish actress Kati Outinen. She’s the star of multiple films by Aki Kaurismäki, and here to make an effectively creepy cameo.
“That is not your son,” this unhappy stranger will later tell Sarah, in a hysterical fit where she bashes her head against the car window, leaving a smear of blood. But even before this point, doubt has been creeping in. Why has Chris, a withdrawn loner whom Sarah usually has to wheedle into finishing his food, suddenly gained such an appetite?
And why has he become such a gregarious go-getter at school? “He’s not himself,” Sarah explains to a visiting doctor; it’s one of those suggestive lines that fans of sci-fi horror know how to read.
The source of the menace is an unexplained crater in the forest near Sarah and Chris’s home, which emanates a no-good chthonic vibe, like some kind of folkloric Sarlacc Pit. Before the film’s out, we’ll have paid it a visit, but until then, the aim of the game is making us question the basics of their mother-son bond. If your kid suddenly forgets that he hates powdered parmesan – or “dust cheese”, as he puts it – who’s to say you’re not dealing with a substitute?
There are whispers of subtext here, to do with Sarah’s separation from her husband, and Chris acting out accordingly. She claims that a scar on her forehead is the result of an accident, but of what kind? And a mother’s instinctual paranoia about raising a boy – is he truly her son, or really his father’s? – sits beneath the supernatural elements, as it did in The Babadook.
Cronin’s film can’t match that one for homemade artistry, though, and while The Hole in the Ground is solidly put together, it’s not freshly crafted enough to pack awe or surprise. The score’s rumblings and sting attacks are straight out of The Shining; the underlighting becomes repetitive; the subterranean climax is equal parts The Descent and Aliens (and knows it). The supporting roles, bar Outinen’s, feel underexploited as opportunities to freak Sarah out in a more 360-degree style.
Still, somewhere in the specifics of Cronin’s is-he-or-isn’t-he scenario – played with gripping detail by Kerslake and Markey – there’s a decent little midnight chiller.
