JOHN AND THE HOLE
Which 13-year-old teen has never dreamt – even but for a day – of throwing their parents, along with siblings and Pearl Jam record collection, in a bottomless pit in the garden? Unfortunately, digging a hole of several feet deep in a garden of two square inches rarely goes unnoticed and the plan usually falls apart after the first few shovels of unearthed soil, accompanied by an earful along the lines of “You better fill up that hole immediately and mow the lawn instead!”. But that’s where John differs from the run-of-the-mill BIFFF-er; he’s got a gardener to mow the lawn, a garden not unlike Hyde Park which already has a fully-dug, concrete hole in the back. Why? “You never know when it can come in handy”, his dad unwittingly says. Very handy indeed! Once John finishes dumping his dad, mom and sis in the ditch, he can get on with the important things of life: playing videogames, eating chicken wings, driving daddy’s SUV all over town… and, out of a sense of newfound responsibility as head of the family, feeding leftovers to his kin. JOHN AND THE HOLE is a weird, darkly comic coming-of-age fable by director Pascual Sisto and award-winning screenwriter Nicolás Giacobone – he snatched an Oscar for BIRDMAN’s script -, mirroring HOME ALONE in which Macaulay Culkin’s “Guys, I’m eating junk and watching rubbish!” takes a disturbing turn, reflecting John’s empty, alienating, bourgeois sheltered existence.