Review: 'John and the Hole' Isn't Keen to Give Many Answers, or Even to Articulate Compelling Questions

Half an hour into this Pascual Sisto-directed psychological drama, a young girl named Lily (Samantha LeBretton) requests a story of her mother (Georgia Lyman):�"John and the Hole." Does Lily's request have something to do with the events we're seeing on screen?

John (Charlie Shotwell) is the 13-year-old son of Brad (Michael C. Hall) and Anna (Jennifer Ehle). He's a shy kid, introverted and a little strange, given to oddball questions like, "What's it like to be an adult?" Whether it's because he's in a hurry to make a dry run of living on his own, or because he has something else on his mind, the day arrives when John decides to drug his parents and his older sister, Laure (Taissa Farmiga), and dump them into an abandoned, half-constructed bunker he's discovered in the woods.

John has clearly put some thought into this adventure, because he's figured out exactly how to get is family members to the site and then down the hole safely. He also thinks to bring them fast food and bottled water – the first day he's stranded them, anyway. After that, he gets a little less concerned with looking after them, spending time with his best friend Peter (Ben O'Brien) and keeping the pretense going that his parents have been called away due to a grandfather's health emergency. Eventually, John remembers to bring them risotto, which he's learned to cook thanks to YouTube; the rest of the time he's conducting business the way any young man on his own might: Playing video games, eating junk food, and striving to catch mystical visions by nearly drowning himself in the family pool.

The film has the feel of an urban legend, being full of dread and a somewhat sensational premise, but short on concrete details. Yes, John uses a wheelbarrow to get his family members from house to hole, but how did he hoist them into the wheelbarrow in the first place? How did he get them into the shelter, which appears to be little more than a concrete-lined vault more than twenty feet deep? When Paula (Tamara Hickey), a family friend, grows suspicious and brings a police officer around to check on John, why does the officer leave so easily and never come back again?

The parallels between John's upending of family life and Lily's situation are never made clear. If anything, the two seem to be having opposite experiences; when we next see Lily and her mother, an hour into the film, it's when her mother announces that she's leaving, and Lily – who is only 12 – will just have to make do with the year's worth of rent money Mom is leaving behind. "There's not room for you in the car," Mom snaps, when a tearful Lily pleads not to be abandoned.

There's all sorts of room here for interpretation, or for projection. Is this a parable about the damaging effect on children that our needlessly insecure, paranoid age could be having? Could Lily's erratic appearances be a glimpse at the generational consequences of letting our kids stew in a society poisoned by cynically engineered polarization?

Or is this a satire on the fruits of permissive parenting? There's more than a hint of wry comedy in the sign of John lowering his family provisions, including a bottle of his father's favorite wine, before settling on the edge of the bunker's opening, feet dangling down, and uncorking a bottle of his own.

Either way (or if it's some third option that's driving the film), "John and the Hole" isn't keen to give many answers, or even to articulate compelling questions. The screenplay, by "Birdman" co-writer Nicolás Giacobone and based on his own short story, seems more concerned with generating an alternate reality of juvenile, slightly haywire, perceptions, and then simply letting the story spin itself out. Narrative neatness isn't an overriding factor, and maybe it shouldn't be in a story like this one, about children calmly running amuck and taking the reins with no idea of what to do next.

"John and the Hole" premieres in theaters and VOD August 6.