Couple in a Hole - Reviews

 COUPLE IN A HOLE

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.

 Guardian Review Link

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.

Variety Review 

A grieving "Couple in a Hole" -- both psychological and literal -- are the focus of Tom Geens' oddball drama.

Sometimes an even greater mystery than why someone chose to create a particular movie is why someone else chose to fund it. Both questions exert a greater fascination than anything onscreen by the end of “Couple in a Hole,” Belgian writer-helmer Tom Geens’ second feature. This initially intriguing drama centers around the odd conceit of two grieving Scottish parents who find themselves living in a French forest crawlspace near where their only child died. Bizarre yet literal-minded pic gradually goes out on a limb too far as the scenario moves from leisurely and enigmatic to exasperating and random. Commercial prospects for this befuddling, eventually ridiculous endeavor look remote.
It takes some time to figure out just what John (Paul Higgins) and Karen (Kate Dickie) are doing squatting beneath a dead tree in the mountains of Midi-Pyrenees. We eventually suss that they were living abroad when a fire destroyed their home and took the life of their young son. Still in a traumatized state months later, Karen can’t bear to leave the area, though it would seem there are easier ways to do just that than camping rough, foraging and trapping wild animals for food (the couple apparently don’t lack funds).
The two scrupulously avoid all other human contact; Karen has even managed to develop agoraphobia without benefit of an actual house to enclose herself in. But when she’s bitten by a poisonous spider, John is forced to visit the nearest village, where passer-by Andre (Jerome Kircher) helps him get the needed medicine. Though initially hostile toward further contact, John gradually accepts Good Samaritan Andre’s overtures of friendship, though neither man really speaks the other’s language.
When Karen discovers this supposed betrayal of their isolated vigil, however, there will be consequences — overblown, silly ones, which seem especially discordant coming in an unconvincing rush after the methodically slow, spare buildup.
Skillful thesps on tap (also including Corinne Masiero as Andre’s no-nonsense wife Celine) are committed, with Dickie (of “Red Road” and “Game of Thrones”) in particular clearly having made the skin-and-bones physical transformation to play someone who’s had months of significant dietary deprivation. But while Geens’ premise seems a bit fantastical — he’s said his starting point was simply the incongruous image of a normally dressed middle-class couple living in a dirt hole — his execution is all too straightforward and lacking the worked-out psychological nuances that might have made such a conceptual leap credible. Nor do the characters deepen to ballast later developments, which include melodramatic appearances by a shotgun and a wild boar.
Adding to the general disconnect between fuzzy intentions and dubious results is a score of mostly instrumental songs by U.K. indie band BEAK> that at first seems an arrestingly odd textural choice, then just becomes self-defeatingly odd. Pic’s one real pleasure is Sam Care’s widescreen lensing of the spectacular countryside.