The Hole (2001)

Credits / Details

66%
Overall Rating

Ranked #2,474
...out of 20,869 movies

Genres: Psychological Thriller Thriller

Four teenagers at a British private school secretly uncover and explore the depths of a sealed underground hole created decades ago as a possible bomb shelter. --IMDb

Review by Chad
Added: October 23, 2004

In this U.K. export, we focus our attention on a group of young adults attending college. We start the film with Liz Dunn (Thora Birch), a shy girl who is trying to get the attention of Mike Steel (Desmond Harrington), the son of a well-known American rock star. However, Mike is seemingly unaware of her mere presence, and focuses his attention on the more popular ladies running around the school. Meanwhile, Mike is having some problems of his own, which he shares with his best friend Geoff (Laurence Fox); apparently, both of them are required to go on a weekend camping trip with their classmates, and neither of them fancy the idea of spending three days out in the wilderness. Back to the other storyline, we find Liz taking her problems to her own geeky best friend Martin Taylor (Daniel Brocklebank), and he comes up with a solution to help her out; he knows of an abandoned World War II bunker out in the woods by the school, which he just so happens to have the key to. Martin proposes that Liz could spend the weekend with Mike in there, which would help them bond together. On Mike's side of things, he'd be sure to want to go along with it... after all, he's wanting to get out of the camping trip. Liz agrees to the plan, and Martin goes off to talk to Mike about it, completely covering for Liz's secret crush on him. Mike agrees to the plan as well, and drags along Geoff and his girlfriend Frankie (Keira Knightley). The crew put together a plan, which is to tell their parents that they're going on the camping trip, tell the school that they're going home for the weekend, party the weekend away in this bunker, and be back to school before anyone notices anything suspicious. Everything goes right on schedule, until the day that they're supposed to leave... they then find out that the escape hatch has been locked, and it's now impossible for them to get out. The tempers flare, supplies run dangerously low, and people start to die... what will happen to our fearless foursome?

So begins the very condensed version of our plot here. I purposefully left out a large chunk of the plot, for fear of spoiling the excellent storyline that's to be found here. While I realize that it sounds like your typical WB special from the overall gist of things, and the back of the DVD makes it sound like a Scream ripoff, it wound up being neither of the above; instead, it's a rock-solid thriller with a storyline that ranks up there in the top five that I've seen this year. The way that the storyline is put together is one of the things that I found most interesting about this film... instead of a strictly linear plot line, the sequence of things is mixed up throughout. The opening scene takes place at the middle of the storyline, and various parts of the experience in the bunker are seemingly thrown around at random. As I got to the midway point of this movie, I started to think that this method wasn't working out; however, after seeing the way the rest of the movie panned out, I found that it was done to perfection. There were no holes in the storyline, major twists were introduced that shattered any ideas you may have about what's going on, everything clicked together in the end, and the journey to that grand finale was kept entertaining and suspenseful throughout. Not a single word of criticism from myself on this aspect.

While a great storyline can take a movie far, the acting is what really makes or breaks a film. Thankfully, a great cast was put together to support the movie, with nobody coming out with anything less than an average performance. Thora Birch (Liz) is by far the best of the bunch, pulling off an incredible performance. Her character goes through a number of changes in emotion throughout the film, and Thora manages to make each one seem as realistic as one could hope for. The controversial Keira Knightley (Frankie) is the one that falls into the average category, as she wasn't flat-out bad, just a bit bland in the role. This could partly be attributed to the fact that the character she plays wasn't vital to the overall storyline, but I suspect that the former may have caused the latter in this situation, if you catch my drift. Laurence Fox (Geoff) falls somewhere between average and great with his performance. While it was certainly nothing memorable or enthralling, he was definitely above the average level that has been set in recent years. Desmond Harrington (Mike) is also flawless in his role, especially in the final sequences... his facial expressions there are worth hours of dialogue, which is something that I've not seen a large number of actors pull off convincingly.

There's a number of things I wanted to point out here, but didn't for fear of spoiling things too much. However, trust me when I say that this is far from your typical teenie romance and/or modern slasher film, as it's much more than that. Definitely worth a viewing, I couldn't recommend this one enough. 10/10.

#1: ScarsRstarS - added January 10, 2006 at 8:45am
Pretty good. Didnt quite understand why they wanted to make a film bout people go partying in a hole but ya know there are more weird films then anything now a days

#2: Dametria - added June 12, 2007 at 2:49am
I loved this movie. Your sooo right, I passed it up for rental a dozen times because they made the plot out to be some silly teen angst crapfest but its far from it. The characters are brilliant (and you better love them, your spending the whole movie isolated with them), and Thora Birch reminds us why she needs to be taken more seriously as an actress. The first half is kinda slow but its really gets you attached to these kids and about halfway thru the whole movie does a 180 into a mystery-thriller. Not alot of gore and a rather low body count but still very worth it.

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