From the opening, The Hole seems awfully familiar. A global pandemic, quarantines, masks, disinfections, toilet-tissue hoarding. It’s so 2020.
Yet, The Hole was made 22 years ago.
If you’re expecting a moderately-paced movie, you should look elsewhere. Director Tsai Ming-liang takes his time with this one.
And it’s a curious one that you continue pondering long after it’s over.
In a nutshell, The Hole is about two residents who live one above another in a Taiwanese apartment complex, and the relationship that grows between them due to a hole in their floor/ceiling. Lee Kang-sheng plays the man upstairs, while the unnamed woman downstairs is played byYang Kuei-mei.
But that summary doesn’t really do the movie justice.
Tsai sets the movie in a dank, rundown apartment complex and nearby shopping stalls, both almost devoid of people. It’s oppressive and claustrophobic, drenched in continuous rain and relentless noise from air conditioning and other mechanical sources.
Tsai accents all of that with some of the longest cuts that I’ve ever seen in a movie. His medium shots just linger and linger on the characters, with almost no dialog.
Then — disconcertingly — he breaks the monotony with somewhat more brightly filmed musical numbers lipsynched by Yang (though Lee joins her for the final one). The songs — popular ones from the 1950s and ’60s by Hong Kong-Chinese actor and singer Grace Chang — inch the plot along more quickly than the rest of the film.
It’s one of those movies that I probably wouldn’t have watched if it wasn’t a film-club pick, but I’m glad I did.
Now, let me get back to thinking about it.