The Well is a solid eco-thriller that never fully reaches its potential due to its underdeveloped characters and story. There is still a lot to love about his film, yet it never fully satisfies.
In a world where environmental collapse has left survivors to fight over the precious remaining resources, Sarah’s (Shailyn Pierre-Dixon’s) loyalties to her parents, Elisha (Joanna Boland) and Paul (Arnold Pinnock), are tested by the arrival of a wounded man who discovers her family has a secret supply of freshwater.
Documentarian Hubert Davis does something quite fantastic with his post-apocalyptic feature The Well; he makes everything feel as if it could happen. As much as fantastical post-apocalyptic films leave us in wonder, when a film takes the events that happened seriously and makes everything appear incredibly plausible, then the fear and worry for the characters increases tenfold.
It also helps that Davis is able to document this world visually by including such tiny details to help give it an incredibly lived-in feel. Clothes are clearly stitched back together, and buildings are repaired in an amateurish manner, as they lack the equipment to fix and replace things as easily now. You get a great sense of how the world has really changed for the worse. This is an ominous and paranoid world, where no one can really be trusted. In setting up The Well’s story and world, it really has been knocked out of the park.
The conceit is simple: water has become contaminated, and the government has created a barrier to access clean, filtered water. If you drink from the non-filtered water, you become infected and end up in a world of pain until death claims you. By making this a very human disaster that is only amplified by the greed and man versus man. Setting us up for moral questioning of what to do when you see someone who needs our help?
When The Well focuses on this part of the story, it’s excellent and more akin to a drama than a thriller. You sense that there was a turn in the road at one point where it could have gone either way, and instead of making this an intriguing drama of people making decisions that could jeopardise life as they know it, for the sake of saving a person. It becomes something bigger, yet it is never really able to pull that side of the story off as much as you want it to.
Make no mistake, virtually everything in The Well is excellent, from the strong performances to the world-building. You are all in on this family, trying to get the pieces they need to keep their secret well safe. It is when the film attempts to do more, to make us worry about whether Sarah can escape her situation and maybe bring some of the other characters back alive, so they can all live as one community, that the film struggles a tad.
Partly, this is due to the film’s subdued tone. There is an urgency in Paul trying to find Sarah, but the low-key and unassuming nature of the group she does find almost deflates the film. Where a charismatic, practically overbearing leader would be present, we instead have Gabriel. Someone who, on the outside, looks as unassuming as you could imagine. She is deminitive, but instead of relaying a position of fear within her group, it is one of hope. She takes the naive and makes them do what she needs, essentially being the mother hen. But when that mother hen becomes calculating, everyone in her way should watch out.
It’s a unique change-up that almost works for the film; however, it never fully meshes as well as it needs to due to how underdeveloped everything is. It is a shame, as there is obvious potential in such a story. The information dumped upon us at the start of the film rarely gets brought up again for the rest of the film. We are told what happened, but never get to see it; instead, we hope that the moral and ethical points mentioned will prevail.
It also struggles to give sufficient story to all of its characters. By having the amount that we do, in its short enough runtime, they become underdeveloped, especially for how important they are to the story. Instead, it would have helped to have more time with Sarah and Gabriel to really get into the meat of that dynamic. It’s not a terminal problem with the film, though, as what we do get is still more than watchable. As mentioned, scenes that should have tension simply don’t, and so the tension leaves the room a little.
The Well is a post-apocalyptic eco-thriller that tries to forge a new path in the well-worn genre. Instead of focusing on death and fear, it chooses to go with hope despite the trauma.
★★★
For more of our coverage of Fantasia International Film Festival 2025, please check out the reviews below!
Support Us
I am but a small website in this big wide world. As much as I would love to make this website a big and wonderful entity. That would bring in more costs. So, for now, all I hope is to make Upcoming On Screen self-sufficient. Well, enough to make any website fees less of a worry for me in the future. You can support the website below…
Patreon
You can support us in a variety of ways (other than that wonderful word of mouth) and those lovely follows. If you are so inclined to help us out then you can support us via Patreon, find our link here!. We don’t want to ask you much, so for now, we have limited our tiers to £1.50 and £3.50. These will, of course, grow the more we plan to do here at Upcoming On Screen.
Social Media
You can also support us via Twitter and Facebook Instagram and Blue Sky! by giving us a follow and a like. Every single one helps!
Thanks for reading; every view helps us out more than you would think (we have fragile egos). Until next time.
