Metacritic reviews

One could walk away with deep thoughts about modernity and the relationship between nature and man, but that’s not required. Appreciating the beauty of an intricate process unfolding is more than enough.

Frammartino connects the physical with the metaphysical. The world as he renders it is an anthology of concrete objects and unrepeatable moments that are somehow infused with abstract, even spiritual meanings.

It’s not quite a documentary, yet nor is it exactly a narrative feature. It lives alone; the cinematic equivalent of a hermit on a mountaintop.

Frammartino handles the collision between a vanishing then and the encroaching now with a light touch, mournful yet not quite damning.

Il Buco proves that cinema still has the capacity to astonish in a very innocent, childlike way as a medium in which light illuminates a black screen and creates beauty.

Like that abyss, the film offers a substantial degree of exploration for those willing to do the work and take the dive.

The film meticulously evokes a 1961 speleological expedition, but its search for thematic resonance is frustratingly general.

A docufiction that tenderly, wordlessly and rather too obliquely recreates a 1961 speleological expedition to measure the depth of an unexplored crevasse in Italy’s Calabria region.

Il Buco is certainly thoughtful and worthwhile, but perhaps just short of the revelation we were hoping for.

In excluding conversation, commentary, analysis, context, and personality, Frammartino is a cinematic Icarus: he strains high for sublimity and finds a deck of picture postcards.