A mother-son relationship is stretched to its limits in this affecting and chilling Irish horror from first-time director Lee Cronin.

It becomes frustrating to see Cronin populate his genre film with more and more familiar elements, handling them as mere jump scare material and without adding a signature of his own. 

Lee Cronin's trim, jumpy debut feature rewrites no genre rules, but abounds in bristly calling-card atmospherics.

Hole In The Ground: Trying to escape her broken past, Sarah O'Neill is building a new life on the fringes of a backwood rural town with her young son Chris.

★★★☆☆ A young woman retreats to the Irish countryside with her son in Lee Cronin’s debut feature The Hole in the Ground. Sarah O’Neill...

Mounting weirdness descends as a mother and young son set up home in the middle of a dark and sinister forest

The film’s unoriginal solution to its mystery is redeemed by the streamlined ambiguity of Lee Cronin’s images.

How well do you know your child? Lee Cronin’s wonderfully acted horror movie is set in rural Ireland and has a beleaguered single mum, Sarah (Seána Kerslake), suddenly wondering if her little boy, Chris (James Quinn Markey), is quite himself.

Lee Cronin's Irish horror stars Seána Kerslake. Read the Empire review.

Reviews for "The Hole in the Ground," ‘The Cannibal Club," "Tuftland," "Devil's Path," "2050" and "Virginia Minnesota."