The Well Movie Review

C Fritz Coleman is a lover of all things horrific, strange and ridiculous. He likes horror, comedy, heavy metal and jigsaw puzzles. He likes to keep to himself but will talk your ear off if you happen to mention the right subject. When Fritz isn’t writing fiction, he spends his time using long pieces of grass to tickle his cat.

Every now and then you’ll come across a job that looks just too good to be true. Let’s say you’re making a name for yourself in the world of classical painting restoration and one day you get an offer from a rich client requesting the restoration of a medieval portrait. At her mansion.

In Italy.

Talk about a perfect job, right? Well, it would be perfect if not for the prison underneath the mansion. A prison guarded by a homicidal beast of a man with a penchant for tossing the prisoners down a well in the center of the room. Obviously, that’s not the end of things either. Once splattering to the bottom of the well, the poor victims find they are not alone. Someone, or something, approaches their shattered body and starts eating them alive, leaving nothing but their screams to echo back up to their fellow prisoners above.

Aside from all that, the job is perfect.

The Well is a delightfully nasty little piece of business. Director Federico Zampaglione along with cowriter Stefano Masi have crafted a solid slab of grisliness that scratches just the right kind of gore-hound itch. It starts off at a deliberately slower pace as Lisa (Lauren LaVera) makes her way through the Italian countryside by bus, introducing the setting and the background characters, without a hint of foreshadowing of the violence to come.

You might get the impression that you’re in for your typical slow-burn type of story. It looks like the kind of movie that will take its time ramping up little by little before hitting one big pop at the end. But just as you’re starting to feel nice and cozy with the Italian scenery, Zampaglione and company bring the hammers down and make it clear: This is not a slow burn.

You’d think we would run out of creative ways to chop, slice, eviscerate, and otherwise mutilate the human body at this point. The Well proves that we’ve only just scratched the surface on bodily dismemberment. However, rather than being simply an exercise in more and more gross-out effects (which there are plenty), The Well cleverly paces the carnage, ensuring that it always packs a punch.

The creative team wisely recognizes that you can only smash limbs and tear flesh so many times before the viewer becomes desensitized. Peppered between the scenes of extreme horror are little injuries that set the stage for the next round of brutality. Case in point: Early on in the restoration project, Lisa accidentally slices her finger with one of her tools. For such a small injury, it’s a remarkably effective, wince-inducing moment.

Most of us don’t know what it feels like to be splayed open with an ax or have a couple limbs chopped off. We know it must hurt, but only on a theoretical level. Very few of us have actually been attacked with an ax, so we can only guess what the subsequent agony might feel like.

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We’ve all sliced our fingers open, though. Those of us with butterfingers may have sliced them open more than once. The finger scene creates an incredibly visceral response in the audience. We know what that feels like and we can relate to that much more when we see it on screen. The Well manipulates our emotions perfectly with these little moments. Once our nerves have been properly frayed by the minor cuts and lacerations, we’re completely primed and ready to really feel it when the big injuries enter the picture. It’s during the violent moments, big and small, that The Well truly shows off its prowess.

Where it falters is in the execution of the story. Despite the strong and relatively unique premise, it struggles to convey information in a satisfactory manner. Most of the plot development is outright stated between characters. While conversational exposition isn’t the worst way to fill the audience in on what is happening, it’s not exactly the most compelling either.

What’s more, despite the upfront detailing of the story through conversation, the movie still feels largely unexplained. It’s simultaneously heavy on the exposition, yet somehow too vague to really make sense of the big picture. One gets the general idea: evil painting, something supernatural, people stuck in a prison, etc. We know it all ties together, but how exactly is never completely clear. Once the stories converge it kind of sort of makes sense as long as you’re not inclined to think too hard about it.

But that’s just fine for people like me.

The Well is a gnarly, fast-paced, and brutally fun time. When it exercises its special effects muscle, it stands out as one of the best in recent memory. The story itself is a bit loosey-goosey, but like all fine cinema, that’s not the point. The point is about the imagery and how it makes you feel.

The Well made me feel gross. I highly recommend it.