Couple in a Hole review - Scots go feral in France in poignant wilderness drama

Heading to the woods to deal with one’s demons is a common form of therapy in cinema. Emile Hirsch said goodbye to privilege in Into the Wild, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe retreated to a remote cabin after the death of their son in Antichrist and last year’s Toronto film festival had a grieving Reese Witherspoon traipsing through rough terrain in Wild. A year on, the self-explanatory Couple in a Hole takes that trope to a fascinating new place.

As we meet Scottish couple John and Karen, they are living in a hole in the middle of the French countryside. Their lifestyle is simple and devoid of modernity. John spends his days foraging for food, water and resources. Karen stays within their dirt cave and stitches together furs. Their domestic landscape has a firm structure and they need no one else to survive. But when Karen suffers a spider bite, John is forced to find help. He rushes to the nearby village and a local farmer provides him with medication. This small gesture opens up a dialogue and starts to reveal the reason why John and Karen are living in this bizarre manner.

There’s a fantastically assured sense of storytelling that’s infused within writer and director Tom Geens’ sophomore feature (his first was the little-seen 2009 drama Menteur). He puts us in a hole with the duo with no explanation and minimal dialogue. Their behaviour is odd (he times her eating a worm, she makes him strange gifts that he tosses off a cliff) and there’s an uneasy Haneke-esque chill in the air as we head into the unknown.

But while Geens isn’t trying to make it easy for the viewer, as the film progresses, he delivers a careful drip-feed of clues that ensures that it’s never that hard. The patient structure allows for a deeper learning of the two characters before their backstory is revealed, which transforms the apparent severity into something far more humane. The cave is a duvet, one which absorbs sadness and avoids the harshness of the world. The hole they’re in is a hole that we’ve all been in.

As the titular couple, Paul Higgins and Kate Dickie are remarkable. Their quietly convincing interplay and heartbreaking steeliness work together to deliver a deeply felt portrait of a couple dealing with sadness. Geens is carefully restrained, refusing to stuff flashy surrealism or nightmarish flourishes in his film, realising that the sounds of nature can be terrifying enough.

It’s not perfect. There’s an unconvincingly engineered set of circumstances towards the end that results in a few overwrought touches and the very final moment is a tad misjudged, but this is a poignant and freshly told film about the devastating power of isolation.