The Hole in the Ground Review

The Hole in the Ground's two leads, Sarah (Kerslake, left) and Chris (Markey, right) - CREDIT: IMDb -

The Hole in the Ground is a horror film from first-time feature director Lee Cronin and stars Seana Kerslake and James Quinn Markey.

Scottish veteran James Cosmo occasionally pops up and his near-200 acting credits dwarfs the combined 15 of the two leads, which is a good indication of the inexperience behind the picture.

First-time feature director, first film for Markey to be released on the big screen, eighth feature for Kerslake, and written by Stephen Shields and the aforementioned Cronin – two people who had never written a film before.

This inexperience is evident, but not due to incompetence, more that it is laden with influences throughout without truly managing to stamp their own authority on it.

There is a sequence that was taken straight from Cronenberg’s The Fly, and it regularly uses a technique done slightly better in last year’s technically wonderful Hereditary where they focus on a character reacting horrifyingly to something but delay the cut to what they are reacting to in order to build tension.

James Quinn Markey somewhat resembles Haley Joel Osment from his The Sixth Sense and A.I. days, so much so that Markey is the same age as Osment was at The Sixth Sense’s release. He possesses the otherworldly qualities needed for the role that Osment also shows in A.I..

The film opens with a sombre journey home from a lonely amusement park as Sarah (Kerslake) and Chris (Markey), mother and son respectively, establish how sombre and lonely they are: they’ve had to move to an old house next to the woods, the dad hasn’t come with them, Chris is bullied.

We soon find out that in a shocking turn of events, the neighbouring forest houses a threat to the safety of our leads. This threat is the titular hole in the ground.

The horror never really goes beyond slowly disturbing you, but it didn’t need to – there were enough creepy moments laced throughout Sarah’s struggles with motherhood to whet the appetite.

Dimly lit rooms and empty country roads are, as you’d expect, the setting of the film’s scares but arguably the main facilitator too. Seeing a cloaked stationary figure or someone eating a spider are never going to be appealing, but the fear is enhanced by how devoid of life the locations feel – the characters are truly on their own.

- CREDIT: IMDb -

Most of the film’s discussion points are about family (the trials of being a single mother, the effect of familial upheaval on a child, seeing your child grow beyond what you think you know about them), but its main theme is at the other end of the spectrum: loneliness.

This isn’t told explicitly by Sarah telling us that she is lonely, but through her very deliberately barren and worn facial expressions as well as through the anguish she expresses when it seems that her son – the one bit of love she has left in the world – is no longer the person he once was.

In addition to Kerslake’s performance, the wonderful camerawork is conducive to projecting the theme. When she is at her lowest, the frame is devoid of another face and walls and doorways are positioned as a barricade between her and human interaction. It always gives the illusion of her being alone in the frame, even if that is far from the case.

The ability in cinematography is shown right from the off with an excellent shot that places the camera up in the heavens before flipping while using the reflection of the massive lake to provide a beautiful symmetrical shot of the landscape and mirroring itself. Again, it’s not wholly original to see a director using reflections to provide a pretty shot, but the end product is good enough for you to ignore it.