Guts Reaction - The Hole in the Ground

As a fan of The Babadook and Under the Shadow, I’ve always got room for another exploration of mother-child relationships through horror, so I enjoyed The Hole in the Ground.

Sarah and her son Chris move to a remote house in the countryside. They encounter a deranged old woman who apparently killed her son because she thought he was an imposter. After encountering a sinkhole in a pinewood, Sarah begins to suspect the same of Chris.

In The Babadook the engine of horror was complex grief. In Under the Shadow it was political repression and armed conflict. The Hole in the Ground never spells out what the trauma is, but I got the impression Sarah and Chris had suffered domestic violence at the hands of Chris’s father.

I felt the film could have dug into that much more deeply. Physical abuse within the family opens up its own deep well of questions. But the film seemed content to stay at a generic level. For example, the damage to Sarah and Chris’s relationship seems to come about purely as a result of the supernatural twist. Whereas with Amelia and Samuel in The Babadook, it is well established before, and apart from, the appearance of the eponymous monster. 

However, The Hole in the Ground is rescued from mediocrity by the filmmaking. It is perfectly paced, and there are certain sequences that are just brilliant. The soft, muffled atmosphere of the pinewood where Sarah first discovers the strange, collapsing hole, for example. And the scenes where Sarah begins to suspect Chris is not her son are exquisitely uneasy. I wished there had been more of them, and that greater risks had been taken.

Still, well worth a watch.