Slow, quiet and melancholy, this irish-finnish film explores the hardships of being a single mother using the changeling legend as an illustrative framework. An A24 production guarantees a lack of jump-scares or easy frights, instead focusing on a slow building suspense and dread with a gorgeous backdrop. Seana Kerslake wonderfully plays the mother, living isolated in the Irish countryside without aid and slowly beginning to doubt the nature of her own child and sanity. This actress is capable of conveying a wealth of information in little physical mannerisms and expressions, augmenting a dialogue lean script and aided by some genuinely good direction for the director’s first film. The metaphors are thick, as the child begins to shift and change before her eyes into something alien and disquieting exacerbated by the solitude and hints of a dark threat from the titular hole in the ground. Attempts to raise concern and alarm only serve to raise suspicion about her competence, thus entrenching her isolation and the pervasive feeling of helpless dread as events begin escalating. The film doesn’t present anything new in terms of storytelling, in fact another recent film The Hollow covers much of the same ground, but there is is a patience and restraint to how the film proceeds that serves to render each scare and horrific visual highly impactful. There is plenty of rehashing of tired tropes and what explanations arrive are often delivered by exposition dump (rather jarring as the script’s dialogue is measured and often minimal), but the film still manages to be extremely effective. The setting is gorgeous, but too much color desaturation is used resulting in washed out visuals with a palette of shades of greys and blues. However, the majority of the film’s flaws are forgivable as the movie is gorgeous, creepy and well acted (save for some of the child’s scenes, but still decent considering his youth), hopefully something the director can build upon as the start as a promising filmography.
The Hole In The Ground