Taiwan's Tsai Ming-Liang turns inertia into suspense. He refuses sequentiality for deep dives into metaphor, but he keeps us guessing on his metaphors. The Hole starts with a black screen and news of a plague; radio voices telling people to move on, move out, the buildings and streets are not safe. Anyone left behind after midnight on New Year's Eve 1999 will be left without power, without water, and in destitution.
The film follows two folks who are not going anywhere, the Man upstairs (Lee Kang-sheng, the director's go-to stand-in), and the Woman downstairs (Yang Kuei-mei). Work matters in The Hole not as a matter of pride or even obligation, but as a routine to stave off existential collapse. The Man opens the store, looks around for a scrawny cat, his only friend. He feeds the kitty. A solitary Customer (Miao Tien, a veteran of Ming-Liang's first two movies and decades of martial arts classics) emerges for the murk. He wants a certain kind of bean paste. The Man explains that the brand is discontinued. The Customer wanders off through the indoor marketplace where only the Man's shop is open. He never speaks again. Only wanders.
Ming-Liang's a standard-bearer for Beckett's absurdity-as-painand/or vice-versa, with a dash of Sarte's hell-is-other-people. Only that dash, though, since the director sees how people want to get together, their own pride and injuries just keep getting in the way.
A conventional plague movie would proffer the sickness, then cleave the many down to the few, who must cooperate to survive. Instead he gives us the few, already disinclined to connect before the plague. When the titular hole opens in the Man's floor (the Woman's ceiling), a single cockroach crawls through. The movie plague, occasionally referenced, turns people into human cockroaches, scuttling on all fours away from any bright light.
Like humanity, roaches grow powerful in number, but singly stay vulnerable to squashing. We also get elaborate musical numbers, which I'll leave you to discover. The musical numbers make no linear sense but seem psychologically and spiritually necessary.
Government radio tells the Man and the Woman that they can't live on rainwater, but the ever-present heavy rain doesn't seem to hold out life—it encircles, sieges, and slowly crushes the building like a huge hand on a plastic strawberry cage. The singing and dancing may or may not be someone's head. It certainly emerges as an escape, necessary escape. Our unlikely couple must survive, of course. But beyond that, they must learn to push past themselves and find each other. Highly recommended. Editor’s Choice.