‘John And The Hole’ Ending, Explained

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for John and the Hole.

We go to movies to experience lives unlike our own, like, for example: what would happen if John found a hole? The haunting indie John and the Hole, directed by Pascual Sisto, has left audiences reeling with its bizarre ending.

In the grand tradition of “what’s it like to be an adult?” storylines like Freaky Friday, 13 Going on 30, Big and more, John and the Hole takes a decidedly darker route than those comedies, following 13-year-old John (Charlie Shotwell) as he drugs his family and traps them in a hole in the woods, leaving them there for nearly a week while he lets loose. He goes shopping, drives a car, eats junk food — all in pursuit of filling up that empty hole inside of himself, while his family is in an empty hole in the woods.

Eventually, he frees them, wordlessly dropping a ladder down and then disappearing. When they emerge and make it back home, his family finds him floating face-down in the pool at their home, toying with drowning. In reality, he’s fine. The movie ends with the family eating dinner together in silence. John isn’t disciplined or even talked to about trapping his parents and sister in a hole and leaving them to near-starvation. Everything is just the same as it was before: Empty. Except the bunker, which we see being filled with sand.

We also see a character named Lily throughout the film, a young girl who is asking her mother to tell her the story about John and the hole, leading to theories that the whole movie is a parable or dream, shaped by Lily and her mother. Lily’s mother also reveals family history to her, and tells her that she’s leaving, with a 10-month cash fund for Lily to take care of herself.

The film ends with Lily walking near John’s bunker.

In an interview with MEL Magazine, Sisto said that he wanted to leave a lot of John’s story unspoken, letting audiences fill in blanks for themselves, and paralleling that dinner scene at the beginning and end of the movie:

The first time we see the image, it’s like an archetypal family having dinner — there’s nothing to it. But when we see that last image at the end — with everything that happens, and the silence, and the fact that they’re not dealing with it, and the fact that they’re moving on with their lives — it’s so much more loaded. Psychologically, all the characters have changed radically and they’re completely different people. But outwardly, they feel and behave the same way.

John and the Hole premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2020.