Couple in a Hole

Traumatic obsession is hard to get right in film, to draw us as viewers into a situation far beyond our usual experience, make us believe in it, and fix us there. Sometimes it means pushing towards the frenetic energy of madness, which can bring a degree of moment-to-moment tension – no small dramatic advantage. Or there’s the opposite: when we’re invited deep into the withdrawal of catatonic grief, which can come with almost stuporous slowness and silences.

The second is surely harder to engage with, and Belgian-born director Tom Geens faces up to the challenge head-on in his debut for the big screen, Couple in a Hole, a title that doesn’t exactly tell us what to expect – Beckett or bathos. The former feels stronger to start with, not least in a script that’s initially very light on language; I don’t think the first full sentence came until around the eleven-minute mark. But with the intensity of internal states paralleled by an unusual external setting, if you’re not hypnotised by this extreme drama, there may be an element of the latter kicking in, too.

The backstory here reveals itself in a slow, distinctive way. We’re well into the film before we learn the names of its two main characters, John (Paul Higgins, pictured above) and Karen (Kate Dickie, main picture), their Scottish accents one of the few clues that anchors what’s happening to anything particular. If there’s a shortage of words, what does speak immediately is the extraordinary landscape which surrounds them, becoming a presence in itself (it’s the Midi-Pyrénées, and Sam Care’s widescreen cinematography captures its dominating atmosphere stunningly). They’re living deep in a forest that seems to go on forever, before it leads into spectacular views across wide, high vistas.

They have returned to nature, civilisation discarded: he forages for food, catching rabbits; she remains inside the hole of the title, in fact a kind of burrow under a fallen branch. They’ve clearly been there a while, though don’t seem that dirty (there's a dramatic cleansing scene when a rain storm comes on). It has clearly been the man’s effort that has created this world – she is overcome by a burden so profound that even leaving the hole, or rising from a crawling to walking pose, is a challenge.

Then the thrall of their isolation is broken. The woman is bitten by a poisonous spider, forcing her partner to seek help in a local village – that he knows there is one nearby itself offers further context. He's recognised when he gets there, which fills in the picture slightly more, particularly as it precipitates the growing involvement of another couple, a farmer and his wife (Jérôme Kircher and Corinne Masier), whose own relationship balance is a step beyond the ordinary, too. Their gradual intrusion changes the dynamics of the first pair’s woodland retreat, precipitating a final, somehow cathartic denouement.

With something as strange as Couple in a Hole, the question is whether we are gripped sufficiently to take it entirely on its own, highly original terms. At the heart of Geens’s film is an exploration of grief: the performances from Higgins and Dickie (last seen together in Andrea Arnold's Red Road) are powerful and do define a distinct territory, particularly the contact with something primal that she achieves. The film’s visual world is absorbing in itself (occasionally perhaps too absorbing, precisely for itself, as when it goes into slow motion, pictured above), while a spare score from indie band BEAK> (a project from Geoff Barrow of Portishead) proves suitably elusive, its bleak emotional horizons hinting at a pared-down Joy Division.

And yet... Some audiences may be won over, it’s surely a good thing that a film like this stretches the often predictable boundaries of cinema, and it marks Geens out as a director to watch. But I can’t say that Couple in a Hole drew me into its world completely, at least with the kind of hypnotic compulsion that would have trounced all hesitations about subject or form.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Couple in a Hole