If you ever want to get ahead of the game when it comes to the year's buzziest horror movies, you might want to keep a close eye on Sundance Film Festival.
The likes of Hereditary, The Witch and The Babadook have premiered there in recent years, going on to be some of the most talked-about horrors of the year – and you can now add the nerve-shredding The Hole in the Ground to that illustrious list.
Any horror fan will recognise the familiar setup to this Irish horror. A single mother moves to a secluded home in a rural town with her son, following an incident in her recent past. One encounter with a creepy neighbour later, the mother begins to feel uneasy in her new surroundings.
Shortly afterwards, her son goes missing in the forest – which just happens to contain a ruddy massive sinkhole – behind their new home. But when he returns, it's not relief she feels; rather a sense that the boy who came back is most definitely NOT her son...
So far, so familiar. But The Hole in the Ground excels because it doesn't really try to rip up the rulebook. Creepy kids are still one of the most effective horror tropes around and debut director Lee Cronin knows it, delivering a tightly-focused movie that wrings every bit of tension and dread out of the setup.
Smartly, the movie largely centres on the relationship between single mother Sarah (Seána Kerslake) and her son Chris (James Quinn Markey). We get the early signs of foreboding through hints at what's happened before to a child in town, but Cronin lets the relationship between the two develop before ripping it apart.
By the time Chris goes missing, we're invested in the pair of them and it makes all that happens after hit harder.
Kerslake is fantastic as a mother pushed to the very edge – no one believes her, of course – and will do anything to save her son, while Markey joins the esteemed ranks of terrifying children in cinema with a wholly unsettling performance. Trust us when we say that it'll be a long time before you look at a school talent show in quite the same way again.
It's just unfortunate that the other characters aren't quite as fully-rounded as the central pairing. Game of Thrones star James Cosmo is largely there for exposition and to push the plot along as Des Brady, the father of the child who was killed by his own mother as she didn't believe he was her son. The same pretty much goes for Kati Outinen as that mother, but instead of exposition, she's there to provide the early scares.
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But that's a minor issue given that The Hole in the Ground is so effective as a horror. For the most part, Cronin avoids jump scares – although a couple of vivid nightmare sequences do go for the quick shock – and crafts an atmosphere of pure dread, combined with astonishing and immersive sound design. He even throws in a bit of The Descent-esque claustrophobic horror in case you were getting too comfortable.
In a year that will see the releases of IT: Chapter Two, BrightBurn and Jordan Peele's eagerly-awaited Get Out follow-up Us, The Hole in the Ground has laid a considerable marker for them to follow. If your nerves can take it, here's your first great horror movie of 2019.
Director: Lee Cronin; Starring: Seána Kerslake, James Quinn Markey, Simone Kirby, Steve Wall, Eoin Macken, James Cosmo; Running time: 90 minutes; Certificate: 15
The Hole in the Ground is now available to watch on Netflix, and is also out on DVD, Blu-ray & Digital from Vertigo Releasing.
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