The Hole (Nick Hamm, 2001)

Has several ideas, though none of them are executed well. Begins wanting to be a Rashomon meets police procedural story about unreliable narration, but poor direction keeps the film from ever sustaining a plausible point of view and about halfway through the film the Rashomon-esque quality is abandoned as a mere pretense for extending the film's running time. The film then somewhat attempts to become about the dissolution of humanity when faced with entrapment -- sort of a miniatuare Lord of the Flies. But this, too, is bungled by the film's attempts to continually withhold information from the viewer, cutting back and forth between the present and the past, consistently letting every character know more than the audience does before big reveal after big reveal. We are never allowed to live in a moment as if it's actually happening, as the movie is much more interested in trying to trick us than in trying to make us believe anything we're seeing. Thus we are removed from their suffering and, as a consequence, any ability to sympathize with their plight. Bodies begin to pile up before we even have a firm handle on who the characters are. Perhaps the comparisons to Rashomon were unfounded, actually, as this script clearly has another, more recent, movie in mind with its ending: The Usual Suspects. And, like that movie, ends up revealing nothing other than the fact that it has revealed nothing. But The Hole lacks the meta self-awareness of The Usual Suspects, pretending that its ending reveals some dark truth about ourselves. It does not. Because sociopaths are boring. They can do horrible things and not feel bad about it. Why is that interesting? There is something biologically wrong with them. I can understand being interested in that from a scientific perspective. How is it caused? Is it genetic? Can it be cured? These are things worth being curious about. Wondering exactly what kind of awful things they're capable of, I hope for obvious reasons, is not.