Sam Mendes, her American Beauty director, has called her the next Marlon Brando; indeed, I wrote in my piece on the Top 10 Films of 2001 that I find Thora Birch the most captivating actress working, and I meant it. Her Ghost World performance struck me as a modern parallel to Brando as Terry Malloy, and not for any more explicit reason than the way the film becomes a breathing animal when she's on screen. Ditto the British production The Hole, which she makes humane. God, she's dynamite.

In The Hole, Ms. Birch plays Liz, a schoolgirl so shallowly "in love" with an abrasive American exchange student that she seems to seduce herself with her own single-minded devotion to winning his heart. People tell Liz to give up on him, but they're only feeding the monster. With pillowy, hypnotic features that offset a cool, somnifacient gaze, Birch looks like a LeRoy Neiman rendition of Shirley Temple; you'd best be on her good side, those green eyes tell us on occasion, and according The Hole, you might be doomed regardless.

Birch's performance is not so wicked as that, which is its vitality. Somehow, long after our sympathies have shrivelled up, she is able as Liz to squeeze another drop of compassion out of the tube--her obsession is a touch primal, we see our weakest moments in it. Narrative problems aside, the movie stumbles whenever it acts for Birch, as in the overemphatic closing shots, in which we pine for the subtlety of The Omen. Based on a book by Guy Burt, The Hole is an occasionally riveting (and commendably coarse--one can almost hear rumoured upcoming U.S. distributor Dimension sharpening their scissors) piece of filmmaking, but it isn't a confident one: helmer Nick Hamm telegraphs most developments, and his flashback structure fails to resolve itself. You wonder if it wouldn't work better in a linear format.

Liz's thing for the American jerk, Mike (Desmond Harrington), moves her to fix destiny. Although he's besotted with Liz (and is cruelly dismissed as too "gay" for her), confidante Martin (Daniel Brocklebank) agrees to arrange a party (for Liz and Mike and their friends Frankie (Kiera Knightley) and Geoff (Laurence Fox), respectively) that neither teachers nor parents would suspect. It is to take place in an abandoned bomb shelter, whose claustrophobic conditions spell intimacy to Liz; Martin will shut them inside and return to open the door a few days later. And that he did, though a lot later than anyone anticipated, Liz tells a police psychologist (Embeth Davidtz). End of act one.

But why is Liz the only one to have emerged from the titular hole and come forward? How to explain her utter dishevelment upon arriving back at school? Hamm sets up a promising multiple-storyteller device (Rashomon hasn't been copped in awhile) he's all too quick to abandon: Martin's testimony refutes that of Liz, natch, and The Hole is too eager to tell us which version is true. The bomb shelter scenes are extraordinary but arbitrarily placed, muffling their impact--there's no sense of revelation to the crosscutting of "Lord of the Flies" intrigue with the Davidtz character's passive interrogations. (Too, her coworkers have as much dimensionality as stick figures.) It's almost too great a Hole for the gifted Birch alone to fill.

2.35:1 DVD capture: Thora Birch in The Hole

The Hole is available on DVD in North America as a Region 1 Canadian import under the Séville label. It's a great disc, with one drawback (two, if you count the slow response time of the menus): the sound, presented in 5.1 in theatres, has been downmixed to 2.0 stereo. The audio is outstandingly clear and rich in bass, but there's a certain atmosphere that's compromised by the elimination of the surround channels. The video is a happier story: the film's 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer (which can also be cropped on the fly, drastically reducing the width of the letterbox bands for 4:3 TVs, although why anyone would want to butcher the arresting compositions of cinematographer Denis Crossan is beyond me) is glorious, with pinprick-precise detail (shadow and overall) sans edge-enhancement and colours that leap off the screen.

Bonus material includes a nine-minute block of nine deleted/extended scenes (of much poorer picture quality), a few of which flesh out the police procedural subplot. The one omission that takes the cake, however, is an epilogue straight out of countless straight-to-tape thrillers, with Thora doing her best Shannon Tweed cum Veronica Lake. In addition to a 1-minute animated still gallery, cast and crew profiles, and trailers for The Hole, The Fourth Angel (Jeremy Irons), Eye of the Beholder, and Mexico City, Hamm provides an excellent feature-length commentary track for The Hole proper. If nothing else, he shows his utter preparation in going into the production: nearly every shot is broken down into how it was achieved and its desired effect. Hamm also says that he was gunning for "an American movie feel," and both the strengths and weaknesses of The Hole lie in the fact that he succeeded.-Bill Chambers