A young mother living in the Irish countryside with her son suspects his increasingly disturbing behavior is linked to a mysterious sinkhole in the forest, and fears he may not be her son at all.
A genuinely ominous horror film from my homeland of Ireland, what joy. The majority of movies that come out of Ireland are typically dramas or period pieces, well-made most certainly but after a while, they become overly repetitive. “The Hole in the Ground” makes for a nice change of scenery, literally and figuratively.
The story takes place in a remote area in Ireland and centers on a young mother, Sarah (Seána Kerslake) and her little boy Chris (James Quinn Markey). Sarah has fled from an abusive husband and is wanting to start a new life for them both. One day after school, Sarah and Chris take a walk in the woods behind their house and they come across a large sinkhole in the middle of the forest. Rumors in the area say the sinkhole has something evil inside of it and that they kidnap people and replace them with demonic doppelgangers. She instructs Chris to never come out this far by himself and they make their way back home.
Later that night, Sarah is awakened by a large banging sound and upon further investigation, discovers the back door wide open and Chris missing from his bed. She hurries to the forest, thinking he might have made his way to the sinkhole but as she nears it, she glimpses something in the shadows and quickly returns to the house, where she finds Chris standing in the hallway.
Relieved that he is okay, she hugs him and they go back to bed but in the following days, Chris begins displaying peculiar behavior. One night, she hears strange noises coming from his room and when she peeks under the door, she sees him scurrying after a spider, an insect he has always been deathly afraid of, and once he catches it, he eats it.
Sarah meets a local, Des (James Cosmo), whose wife supposedly went mad years earlier claiming that her young son had changed and was no longer hers and then proceeded to drive over him, although Des states that was an accident. When she tells him about Chris, he says he can’t help her but that his wife always stated a mirror showed one’s true reflection.
Later that evening, with Chris behaving stranger than usual, she asks him to play a game with her, one they used to play all the time but when she begins, and Chris just stares blankly at her, oblivious as to how the game is played, she exclaims, “You are not my son!” Chris becomes enraged and throws her around the kitchen utilizing superhuman strength, knocking her unconscious. He tries to bury her head in the ground outside but passes out before he can finish the job.
Sarah awakens shortly thereafter and takes Chris to the basement. While he is passed out, she holds a mirror to his face and quickly catches a glimpse of a being that is not human. She locks him in the basement and makes her way to the sinkhole with the intent of retrieving her real son but once underground, she uncovers a labyrinth of tunnels, each one scarier than the last until she finally locates Chris but as she tries to escape, something gives chase. As she nears the entrance, the thing following her closes the distance and she quickly realizes it is her!
“The Hole in the Ground” is effectively creepy and relies more on atmosphere than exploding heads or dismembered body parts to fill the screen. For his feature film directorial debut, Lee Cronin has crafted a movie filled with dreaded ambiance and a genuine fear of the unknown. Having been born and raised in Dublin, I made many of my earlier films there and in other areas of the country and I always felt these locales would make for a great scary movie setting. “The Hole in the Ground” was filmed in an area of Ireland known as Enniscrone in County Sligo and it is the absolute perfect backdrop for a film of this temperament. Using natural sounds, like the rustling of trees and the howling of the wind, “The Hole in the Ground” takes everything we have become accustomed to in our natural surroundings and cleverly uses it against us, so that next time you hear a rustling tree, you will immediately think of that big sinkhole and the nightmarish horrors that lie beneath it.
Available on DVD April 30th
