Synopsis
Trying to escape her broken past, Sarah O’Neill is building a new life on the fringes of a backwood rural town with her young son Chris. A terrifying encounter with a mysterious neighbour shatters her fragile security, throwing Sarah into a spiralling nightmare of paranoia and mistrust, as she tries to uncover if the disturbing changes in her little boy are connected to an ominous sinkhole buried deep in the forest that borders their home.
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Cast
- Seána KerslakeSarah O'Neill
- James Quinn MarkeyChris O'Neill
- Simone KirbyLouise Caul
- Steve WallRob Caul
- Eoin MackenJay Caul
- Sarah HanlyLil Jones
- James CosmoDes Brady
- Kati OutinenNoreen Brady
- Bennett AndrewDoctor
- David CrowleyTeacher
Recommendations
- 75
Slant Magazine
The film gradually becomes something more than a mixtape of horror gimmicks as it homes in on a frightening real-world subtext. - 70
Film Threat
The Hole In the Ground surprised me, took me on a fun ride, and returned me, almost unshaken. This was a brilliantly satisfying monster movie. - 70
The Hollywood Reporter
[It] will evoke comparisons for many with The Babadook, and while this is more generically conventional than Jennifer Kent's breakout thriller, it still taps potently into parental anxieties and primal fears. - 70
Screen Daily
There’s a freshness to the characterisations, a good eye, and for a time Cronin constructs a tense guessing game as to whether it’s mental breakdown or supernatural forces at play. - 70
Variety
[Cronin's] trim, jumpy debut feature rewrites no genre rules, but abounds in bristly calling-card atmospherics. ... Only in the film’s muddy-in-all-senses finale — which leaves a few too many dots unjoined, even by forgiving genre standards — does its grip on proceedings slip a notch. - 67
The A.V. Club
Parental anxiety has long been fertile ground for horror, going back to "The Bad Seed" and "The Exorcist," and The Hole In The Ground finds a somewhat fresh angle on the possessed-kid subgenre. - 60
Empire
A soft-spoken yet chilling domestic horror film that tells its slightly overfamiliar tale effectively, with strong performances, quietly disturbing atmosphere, one or two friendly clichés, and good, old- fashioned scares. - 60
Los Angeles Times
It’s always welcome to see a chiller that builds suspense from ideas and characters — and where the beasts from beyond are almost beside the point.
