THE HOLE (2001)
That title...the plot...must...resist... The Hole starts well, but it's got a serious flaw - its plot depends on our being able to believe one character is diabolically clever enough to wriggle out from a pile of trouble that would crush most of us to paste, and yet that trouble is brought about in the first place by one ridiculously stupid bonehead mistake after another by that same character. Which is a shame, because it boasts a terrific premise and cast, sure to rope in a lot of renters, and it's well made enough that when things looked like they weren't going to recover from their going sour, I felt a killer little gem slip away. It all starts with Thora Birch, stumbling through "Have You Seen Me?" pamphlets with her picture on them while covered in blood and a nasty coat that's way too big for her, looking like she's had a positively dreadful time. She gets to a phone and has just enough presence of mind to call emergency services (I was gonna say 911 but I don't know what the number is in England), scream, and collapse. Turns out she's been missing for eighteen days along with three other teenagers, and a psychologist (Embeth Davidtz) endeavors to find out what happened to her. Thora tells a tale of being trapped by a friend in an underground bunker for the duration; the friend she blames for locking her in (Daniel Brocklebank) tells a very different story. I kept expecting The Hole to jerk me around in ways it ultimately didn't; like when Brocklebank is apprehended by the police, his face is blurred on TV and the reporter says he can't be identified because he's underage, and I'd figured that at the end of the movie, it would be revealed that they'd snagged the wrong guy. Didn't happen; we see Brocklebank getting interrogated just a couple of minutes later. I'd also feared that the plot would prolong the question of whose story is true until the end, which would have been a dumb move because one of the stories contains a lot more verifiable/falsifiable facts. That didn't happen either. The Hole endeared itself to me early by so quickly thwarting the low expectations its plot twists gave rise to. Much of the movie is told in varying layers of flashback, and the events inside the bunker expectedly make for the best scenes. While we're not given a very good depiction of the layout of the bunker, one isn't needed - though I would've liked to have known the purpose of that big hole in the middle of the Hole. It's dusty, rusty, disgusting in a few places, and it's a little hard to believe four teenagers would think it's a fun place to spend three days, but considering the female company (Birch and Kiera Knightley), you can hardly blame the guys. It's a moody-as-hell set, the claustrophobia of which is interrupted each time we stop flashing back to it, which is frequently. This might have worked better in the novel (by Guy Burt) upon which it was based. The flashback structure, introductory scene aside, saps a lot of intensity that might be sustained otherwise. Which is a problem, but not an insurmountable one. No, the insurmountable one is in how such genius and such stupidity, from the same character, can drive and resolve the entire plot. I also halfway (at least) expected one of those endings where we learn something which completely re-writes the reality of everything we'd seen before. Blessedly, this does not happen either. The Hole is in many ways, doing its best job at what it's not doing. And for the dirty old men among you, you get to see Kiera Knightley's boobs (she was all of fifteen at the time), and a pretty steamy makeout scene with Thora. BACK TO THE H's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |