John And The Hole (2021) - It's Not John!

 

★★★★☆

Now there aren’t many films that would arouse my interest to want to check out. And even if some would, I couldn’t get to finish watching them after all, due to the bad taste in my mouth, or my growing impatience during coronavirus lockdown that seems to be never ending, or the stupidity they were somehow able to make me feel. ‘John and the Hole’ is gladly, not one of them!

I’m not saying this coming-of-age story is something I’ve never seen before. In fact, the story’s nothing so off the wall here. A seemingly worry-free adolescent boy facing monotony and confusion is about to do something to break his everyday routine; to kill his boredom and feel excited; to make himself significant and get the attention he thinks he deserves; to try to find answers to the questions that have been troubling him maybe. Whatever the reasons, that something he’s going to do still sounds a bit weird and difficult to comprehend from an adult’s point of view, though I’ve seen similar stories that are far more terrifying and much crazier than this!

It’s the style of direction, not the story itself, that makes ‘John and the Hole’ so worth viewing and sticking around till the end to see how it’s going to end up at last. It could be considered Michael Haneke’s version of ‘The Good Son’ or ‘Home Alone’ or any ominous stories involving a troublemaking kid! The mood, the pace, the camerawork, the casting… all are in their right places to make this film a unique experience that manages to get under your skin all the way through. No doubt, it’s John the boy, his bizarre behavior after he discovers the hole that makes me frown from time to time, but it’s the style indeed that chills me to the marrow!

What adults like me consider bizarre and incomprehensible could be just some normal child’s play literally for adolescent boys like John to explore new thinking and experiences as they’re undergoing both psychological and physical changes! Could it be that John was born evil? That can’t be the case to a Buddhist like me who believes that we usually don’t see things as they are but merely what we think they are! So it’s not John being mad and evil over there. It is us most of the time! If you find the ending kind of a letdown, that’s the proof!