Article Dans Une Revue Cine-Excess Journal Année : 2025

Abject Motherhood and the Open Wounds of (Eco)trauma in Lee Cronin’s The Hole in the Ground (2019)

Résumé

This article will discuss Irish director Lee Cronin’s examination of abject motherhood and ecotrauma in his 2019 neo-gothic film The Hole in the Ground. After spending some time in a deep excavation in the nearby woods, Christopher, a young boy, starts acting in such a strange manner that his anguished mother endeavours to rescue her real son from this evil dopplegänger who, she is convinced, has replaced him. Drawing on folkloric beliefs of Irish changelings and absorbing boglands (Gladwin 2016), Cronin’s film explores the ghostly traces of trauma (Bernet 2000) on both the body and the land through the gothic templates of mental illness, ecophobia (Estok 2005) and paranoia. This article wishes to tap into the psychoanalytical framework of trauma studies (Freud 1895; Lacan 1966) to read abject motherhood as ‘afterwardsness’ (Nachträglichkeit), the physiological response to a belated primitive shock. It will also show that Christopher’s uncanny physicality as both distant and alien (Walsh 2007) is part of a broader Irish narrative on dynamics of usurpation. Finally, it will question the film’s ecofeminist agenda (Thompson 2006) by arguing that its intermeshing of the human with the preternatural whereby Sarah becomes a mythical, Orpheus-like manifestation of Creed’s archaic mother (Creed 1993) mirrors a wider response to ecological trauma while bolstering a long-lasting Irish tradition of equating femininity with nurturing and suffering (Alexander 2016).

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hal-04995953 , version 1 (11-05-2026)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04995953 , version 1

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Marine Galiné. Abject Motherhood and the Open Wounds of (Eco)trauma in Lee Cronin’s The Hole in the Ground (2019). Cine-Excess Journal, 2025, Raising Hell: Demons, Darkness and the Abject, 6. ⟨hal-04995953⟩
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