Cou­ple in a Hole

Bel­gian film­mak­er Tom Geens’ sec­ond fea­ture does what it says on the tin; its cen­tral char­ac­ters, John (Paul Hig­gins) and Karen (Kate Dick­ie) are a mid­dle-class cou­ple who live – quite lit­er­al­ly – in a hole. Some­where in the Pyre­nees, the pair have set­tled into a com­fort­able rou­tine; John hunt­ing and for­ag­ing, skin­ning and roast­ing, while Karen stitch­es, sews and sleeps. In fact, their peace­ful wood­land life seems to be going smooth­ly, except for the fact that Karen can’t bring her­self to leave the hole. John is patient, mas­sag­ing his stub­born, fear­ful wife’s out-of-prac­tice joints with atten­tive ten­der­ness, but his attempts to coax her from the hov­el are most­ly futile.

Lured out into the open by the promise of rain on her skin and fresh air in her lungs, we final­ly get a prop­er look at Karen. While John is stur­dy and ath­let­ic, she appears to have aged pre­ma­ture­ly, her frail body con­tort­ed into a per­ma­nent, Gol­lum-like hunch and rav­aged by too much time down under. Her excur­sion is cut short by the arrival of a poi­so­nous spi­der that bites her, send­ing her into ana­phy­lac­tic shock. John is forced out of the for­est and into the near­by town in search of med­ical assis­tance. It quick­ly becomes clear that life in the hole is very much a choice rather than a necessity.

Geens is in no hur­ry to reveal John and Karen’s trag­ic back­sto­ry, though with its brisk 105 min­utes run­time, the plot unfolds at a lan­guid pace, with ample time tak­en to estab­lish John and Karen’s rela­tion­ship before burst­ing the bub­ble of their insu­lar world. When Andre (Jérôme Kircher), the kind­ly local phar­ma­cist enters that fray, the equi­lib­ri­um of their world is unbal­anced. John craves com­pa­ny, and soon the two are fix­ing Andre’s trac­tor and swap­ping sto­ries about saucis­son sec behind Karen’s back.

The harsh­ness of life in the wild is tem­pered by Sam Care’s lush cin­e­matog­ra­phy, his cam­era cap­tur­ing the countryside’s rough beau­ty – from the misty moon that con­stant­ly peeks over the edge of the near­by wood­land, to water­colour vis­tas of the for­est that becomes a tem­po­rary home for the cou­ple. Still, Geens makes cer­tain nev­er to spare us any gory details; at one point a rab­bit is killed and method­i­cal­ly dis­mem­bered; then we watch Karen tak­ing a shit. The director’s assured hand means that this shift­ing between tones works for much of the film, helped along no end by a moody elec­tron­ic score from Bris­tol-based band BEAK (a side project head­ed up by Geoff Bar­row of Portishead).

It’s a shame, then, that the film los­es its way in the final stretch. The first two acts hon­our the gnaw­ing agony of trau­ma, show­ing how psy­cho­log­i­cal pain can sub­sume the lives of those that expe­ri­ence it – and how dif­fi­cult it can be to wrench back and reclaim that life. Geens treats John and Karen’s sto­ry with curios­i­ty and kind­ness; his gaze is inti­mate rather than anthro­po­log­i­cal. Yet, stripped-back sto­ry­telling is swapped for heavy-hand­ed sym­bol­ism in the film’s final act, and it’s frus­trat­ing to see the odd, invit­ing tone aban­doned for some­thing more detached. Still, Geens’ knot­ty, slow-burn­ing med­i­ta­tion on self-preser­va­tion is well worth a trip down the rab­bit hole.