While exploring the neighboring woods, 13 year old John discovers an unfinished bunker a deep hole in the ground. Seemingly without provocation, he drugs his affluent parents and older sister and drags their unconscious bodies into the bunker, where he holds them captive.... (Full plot summary below)
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While exploring the neighboring woods, 13 year old John discovers an unfinished bunker a deep hole in the ground. Seemingly without provocation, he drugs his affluent parents and older sister and drags their unconscious bodies into the bunker, where he holds them captive.
Leave your thoughts about John and the Hole.
| TheWrapCarlos AguilarEven if the film is premeditatedly oblique and too precisely constructed in its cerebral machinations to engage with beyond an intellectual level, the ideas wrapped in its coldness are thought-provoking. |
| RogerEbert.comTomris LafflyIt’s exciting, quietly volatile stuff that digs refreshingly deep into the fears of the coming-of-age genre. |
| The A.V. ClubA.A. DowdJohn And The Hole comes on like a spooky portrait of budding teenage sociopathy, but it resists diagnostic shortcuts. |
| PolygonMatt PatchesThe level of craft John and the Hole brings to its ideas makes it worthy of chewing on. |
| The New YorkerAnthony LaneSisto picks up the spell that is cast by Lowery’s tale, verdant with danger, and continues to weave. |
| VarietyPeter DebrugeIt’s calculated and precise and meticulously constructed in a way that will be of considerable interest to audiences who appreciate stories that unsettle, and those who recognize the precision of Sisto’s approach. |
| The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySisto has an arresting visual style, a firm command of tone and an impressive ability to steer his fine cast onto the same rigorous wavelength, all of which makes him a talent to watch. |
| SlashfilmHoai-Tran BuiIt’s an interesting idea on page, but in John and the Hole, it is all a little too opaque to make sense of Sisto’s muted portrait of adolescence. |
| IndieWireEric KohnDespite its shortcomings, “John and the Hole” shows enough restraint and thematic sophistication to indicate strong potential for Sisto behind the camera. |
| The PlaylistGregory EllwoodNo one would deny Sisto clearly has a vision of what he’d like to accomplish and shows flashes of humor here and there, but the almost overt influences of any number of other filmmakers (Michael Haneke, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Sean Durkin immediately come to mind) have the cumulative effect of making the proceedings feel numbingly familiar. |
