The Hole In The Ground

One night, Sarah's young son disappears into the woods behind their rural home. When he returns, he looks the same, but his behavior grows increasingly disturbing. Sarah begins to believe that the boy who returned to her may not be her son at all.

After reading the synopsis, right away you should be expecting a story about a changeling. Especially since the movie is set in Ireland, where belief in changelings endured until 1895, when Bridget Cleary was killed by her husband, possibly by setting her on fire, because he believed she was a changeling.

A changeling is a fairy that has been left in the place of a human child who has been stolen by other fairies. The changeling may appear sickly and small, or have strange features, like long teeth. They may also seem to be unusually intelligent for their age, and are often prone to unusual behaviour when it thinks it is alone, such as jumping about, dancing or singing to itself. The idea may have been born as an explanation for a difficult child, or a child born with congenital disorders or chronic illnesses, the kind of things that were unexplainable at the time. This was often seen when poor families were faced with the impossible task of being able to afford to care for that child, and as a result are forced to decide whether or not to abandon or kill that child. In hard times that threatened the survival of the entire family, maybe it was easier to believe that your actual child had been taken by fairies, leaving behind a strange and cursed creature, instead of admitting that you were going to let your child die, even if doing so meant that the rest of the family would live. And as a result… you end up with the legend of a changeling. Maybe.

Anyway, that’s kind of what the movie is about…

Sarah is a young mom who has escaped a shitty life somewhere else by moving to rural Ireland with her son Chris. She chooses the creepiest house possible, next to some of the creepiest woods in the world, and lying within those woods is a massive, super creepy sinkhole, a sinkhole that kind of looks like a butthole from overhead.

Being near the sinkhole causes the previously not creepy Chris to become creepy, and the demonstration of the many ways in which this is true is what the film spends most of its time on, instead of the hole in the ground, what’s in it, and what it did to Chris. At least not until the very end of the film, when it feels more like an afterthought, and is presented as a breif and somewhat easily overcome obstacle, there and gone before it really even registers. This is basically the film’s main problem. There’s no answer to anything. There’s no arc either. The film is particularly enamored with the kid eating spiders though. That’s their big showstopper moment, but even that lacks punch, and then the film just kind of moves on. There’s one scene that’s a little bit more wild, but even then, the resolution just kind of levels off, and doesn’t make much sense, or offer any explanation as to why what just happened actually happened. Like I said, this is the film’s overarching problem…

What happened? Why?

In answer, the film just kind of shrugs, and then ends.

It’s not like the events of the film aren’t fun, there’s some good creepiness; the problem is that this is an overly familiar tale that doesn’t add anything new to genre, neither to the strange legends of changelings, nor to possessed kids movies. The problem is that the film is mostly a big wet fart, and even worse, it’s the exact kind of wet fart that you expect it to be while you’re watching it.

The only thing that actually shocked me about this movie is that it didn’t go for the one final twist I was expecting it to, which would’ve been dumb if they had done it, but not doing it just added on one last question of “What the hell was just happened? Why?” right before the end credits.

Thumbs down.