Mirror, mirror on the wall, mirror mirror in the hall, through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole. Or in this case a sink hole, an abyss, a subterranean Midwich Cuckoo’s nest.

THE HOLE IN THE GROUND begins impressively with a mother and her young son in an amusement park hall of mirrors, their images, especially his, distorted, disfigured, made grotesque. It is a precursor of the curse to come.

Writer/Director Lee Cronin follows up with an exquisite aerial shot of the pair in a car heading to their new abode which inverts itself, a harbinger of the upside down world that they are about to encounter.

Their new digs is at the frontier of a forest, in the middle of which is a bloody great hole, a great, grotesque gouge in the ground, a queer quarry rotten to the core.

After the boy ventures into the woods, he returns seemingly unscathed. But his mother senses a change, or more accurately, suspects a changeling, a diabolical doppleganger of her son, not her own flesh and blood.

A fairly major giveaway is that her arachnophobic boy now seems happy to eat spiders, a lip smacking eight leg delicacy.

There’s a creepy old lady – a fairy tale witch type – played deliciously by Kati Outinen and and a lot of figurative and literal burying of heads in the sand.

Written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Lee Cronin, THE HOLE IN THE GROUND is a well-crafted picture with a nice sense of the sinister and the eerie, and a fine central performance by Seana Kerslake as the frantic mother.

Not quite as good as our homegrown The Babadook, or the current horror sensation, US, THE HOLE IN THE GROUND nevertheless is an impressive calling card from a fledgling film maker.

THE HOLE IN THE GROUND will screen in the following cinemas across Australia for ONE NIGHT ONLY on Friday April 12th.
ACT
Dendy Cinemas (Canberra)
Tickets
NSW
Dendy Cinemas (Newtown)
Tickets
Ritz Cinema (Randwick)
Tickets