The Hole
2025 · 12m
Directed by Courtney Karwal
A lonely woman who has never met her neighbors finds a maintenance hole cut between her apartment and the one upstairs. Peeking, then climbing, into the neighbor's world leads to broken bones and an unlikely friendship.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the hole to be a metaphor for connection or loneliness, and Karwal almost lets you believe that before the bones crack—she's deliberately baiting the Sundance-circuit reading and then demolishing it with physical comedy. It's a film that knows exactly what you think it should be and refuses.
The hole itself sits in a lineage of domestic surrealism—Kaufman, Launder—but Karwal's restraint with the editing and her refusal to underline the metaphor speaks to a craft intelligence that trusts the viewer to find the tender underneath the absurd.
The decision to play the fall comedically—the bone-break treated with the same whimsy as the hole itself—is what makes this work; most filmmakers would soften or sentimentalize, but that tonal commitment on a micro-budget is what lifts the whole thing from cute concept into something genuinely alive.