Trying to escape her broken past, Sarah O'Neill is building a new life on the fringes of a backwood rural town with her young son Chris. A terrifying encounter with a mysterious neighbour shatters her fragile security, throwing Sarah into a spiralling nightmare of paranoia and mistrust, as she tries to uncover if the disturbing changes in her little boy are connected to an ominous sinkhole buried deep in the forest that borders their home.... (Full plot summary below)
Enjoy FREE movies and series with your Prime (USA) subscription or when you start a 30-day free trial!
Trying to escape her broken past, Sarah O'Neill is building a new life on the fringes of a backwood rural town with her young son Chris. A terrifying encounter with a mysterious neighbour shatters her fragile security, throwing Sarah into a spiralling nightmare of paranoia and mistrust, as she tries to uncover if the disturbing changes in her little boy are connected to an ominous sinkhole buried deep in the forest that borders their home.
Leave your thoughts about The Hole in the Ground.
| Slant MagazineChuck BowenThe film gradually becomes something more than a mixtape of horror gimmicks as it homes in on a frightening real-world subtext. |
| The GuardianMike McCahillIt always finds new, invariably cinematic ways to nudge us towards its final leap into the abyss. Cronin feels like a real find for our especially insecure moment. |
| Film ThreatNorman GidneyThe Hole In the Ground surprised me, took me on a fun ride, and returned me, almost unshaken. This was a brilliantly satisfying monster movie. |
| The Hollywood ReporterLeslie Felperin[It] will evoke comparisons for many with The Babadook, and while this is more generically conventional than Jennifer Kent's breakout thriller, it still taps potently into parental anxieties and primal fears. |
| Screen InternationalDemetrios MatheouThere’s a freshness to the characterisations, a good eye, and for a time Cronin constructs a tense guessing game as to whether it’s mental breakdown or supernatural forces at play. |
| VarietyGuy Lodge[Cronin's] trim, jumpy debut feature rewrites no genre rules, but abounds in bristly calling-card atmospherics. ... Only in the film’s muddy-in-all-senses finale — which leaves a few too many dots unjoined, even by forgiving genre standards — does its grip on proceedings slip a notch. |
| Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerThe Hole in the Ground is filled with all the tropes of the "sinister child" subgenre, but first time feature director Cronin (best known in horror circles for his 2013 award-winning short "Ghost Train") deftly weds it with the same rural Gothic sensibilities that have made Irish horror such a vibrant and unsettling scene for the last few years. |
| Entertainment WeeklyDana SchwartzThe Hole in the Ground never seeks to differentiate itself from the established horror movie aesthetic: we get creepy jangling lullaby music, a decrepitly old hooded women mumbling to herself ominously, bare feet on creaking wooden floors, broken mirrors. |
| The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloParental anxiety has long been fertile ground for horror, going back to "The Bad Seed" and "The Exorcist," and The Hole In The Ground finds a somewhat fresh angle on the possessed-kid subgenre. |
| The TelegraphTim RobeySomewhere 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. |
