THE HOLE IN THE GROUND: Not Perfect, But Promising For Lee Cronin

Lee Cronin, whose first feature is The Hole in The Ground, is clearly someone who lives and breathes horror. There’s no way someone who didn’t would make a film like this, at least not for their first feature.

The Premise

It tells the story of a young woman, Sarah, and her son. The two are on the run from Sarah’s abusive boyfriend, and although it’s never explained why, Sarah has a big scar on her forehead to prove it, which she conceals beneath a haircut designed to do just that.

But there’s very little backstory of which to speak. When the films opens, the two are driving along a remote forest road, when they almost take an old woman tottering the centre of it clean out. The woman is Bad News, which is evident from the tense music, although it isn’t clear whether she is the antagonist or an omen of worse things to come.

Then, stranger things happen. Deep in the forest, there’s a massive sinkhole in a place in which it has no business being. Sarah’s son goes missing one night, briefly, but then returns and seems different. Which is the film’s entire premise. To her, he seems colder, emotionally distant, and all of the anxieties he was facing (worry about not making friends at school, what Sarah’s divorce means for him, reconciling with his father’s dangerous personality) seem to have been expelled from his mind and replaced by very little. Is her son different, or is it all in her imagination?

Humble Beginnings

Unfortunately, it’s very evident that The Hole in the Ground is the work of someone who has never made a feature film before. He wears his influences on his sleeve. In this one, there are elements of The Descent and The Babadook, and the film is clearly a product of the spate of modern horrors which favour growing suspense (think The Witch and Hereditary) over thick-and-fast scares.

But the difference between The Hole in the Ground and those two films is that they have enough narrative depth and thematic ambiguity to merit the feature film treatment. Essays could be written, and I’m sure they have been, about whether or not The Witch is a feminist film, or a film about people struggling with their faith, or both. The Hole in the Ground has none of those lofty themes, and as a result, it’s a struggle to remain involved in the plot.

The film hangs in some kind of weird limbo between good and bad. It’s neither scary enough to be entertaining, nor in-depth enough to be mentally stimulating. Lee Cronin has made a well-received short film before, Ghost Train, and without something extra, a thirty minute runtime would have benefited The Hole in The Ground more than its ninety minutes do.

Bright Future

The scares, on their own, are effective, but the lack of character development doesn’t give the audience much of a stake in the game. It’s well-trodden ground, but it would have been interesting to see a story in which Sarah meets someone else and tries to move on from her evidently abusive previous relationship.

It’s impossible to say what it involves without ruining elements of the story, but the film has a weird fiction streak which evokes more recent experimental horror and science fiction films like A Field in England and Annihilation, and it would have been nice to have seen a little more of the tense atmosphere and narrative ambiguity which made those films so enthralling.

I don’t think this film is going to have the cultural impact of something like last year’s Hereditary, and I don’t think it’s going to please fans of horror in the same way that did, but Cronin having a film under his belt which was released by A24 likely means that the man has a solid career ahead of him, and even if The Hole in the Ground is by no means a perfect film, he is a director worth keeping an eye on.

The Hole in the Ground: Conclusion

Ultimately, The Hole in the Ground is the rare film which would have benefited from being a little less subtle and amping up the craziness to achieve the sense of unease and disorientation which Cronin was going for. But many big-name directors, most recently Mike Flanagan, went from very humble beginnings to being one of the most exciting voices in modern horror. It’s very possible for Cronin to do the same. All he needs is the right project.

What do you think of The Hole in the Ground? Have you seen it? Let us know in the comments.