The Well was the opening night film of the inaugural Other Worlds Austin Sci-Fi film festival. Cinapse will be covering the fest throughout. See our interview with founder Bears Fonté here.
Believe it or not, one of the elements I find most interesting in post-apocalyptic films is the economy which emerges from the collapse. Fuel is at the center of everything in the Mad Max series, whereas soil was the coveted currency of Waterworld. Cash rules everything around us (or so The Bible says… right?) and in light of societal collapse, a commodity must always emerge. In Thomas Hammock’s The Well, rain ceased to fall on the planet many years prior, turning the Oregon of the future into a desert wasteland. So clearly water emerges as the sacred center of the world economy, and young survivor Kendal (Haley Lu Richardson) will fight tooth and nail to protect her well and chart a course for a more fertile home.
Introduced to us at the Other Worlds Austin film festival by founder Bears Fonté, we learned that writer/director Hammock had been known primarily as a Production Designer leading up to this, and had been involved in such films as The Guest and You’re Next in that capacity. Combine this with the only other things I knew about the film: that it was a post-apocalypse story, and that it featured a kick ass heroine, and The Well had me in its pocket.
It slowly lost me, however, to the point where I would only mildly recommend it to fans who might also get excited about exactly the type of movie I’ve already described. Kendal is quite a strong heroine, so folks looking for that type of element will find it. And Richardson does a competent job anchoring the film. But the script asks audiences to suspend disbelief way too far regarding Kendal’s various skill sets. We know little about her beyond her actions, which is a plus as far as screenplays go. “Show, don’t tell”, and all that. But over and over again Kendal does things which we have no reason to believe she would be trained to do. This teen has lived in a fallen world without water for most of her life, in a desolate valley filled only with dead farms. So her weapon wielding and mechanical skills come as an unwelcomed surprise to this skeptical viewer.
I’m not usually someone who let’s “the little things” get to me, but script elements like this, as well as various continuity problems (maintaining a consistent look for a character after they’ve emerged from an oil pool is likely enormously challenging) and character motivation issues took a lot of the steam out of The Well. I did find a number of elements to be effective, which is why I’d even offer a mild recommend to someone who might already be in the bag for post-apocalyptic stories. The look and sound of the film were strong, if not cutting edge. The desolate locales our story is set amidst look beautiful and haunting on camera. And the fallen-future-Western score occasionally elevated the excitement and tension. As a matter of fact, Kendal’s constant need to survive and travel stealthily made for a pretty tense experience that did have my stomach in knots through large segments.
I also liked how much of the film was about small moments and how isolated it kept its story. We never see the world beyond this arid corner of Oregon. We’re stuck in that locale with our characters. And since there are so few characters, we do get a lot of interactions and conversations which expand the dimensionality of the characters we do have. Kendal survives in a very neatly set up attic hideaway, complete with hidden water pumps and false walls, protecting her and best friend Dean (Booboo Stewart, who looks kind of like an anorexic Joseph Gordon Levitt, and whose first name is apparently Booboo). Who does this neat hideaway protect them from? That’d be Mr. Carson (John Gries, perhaps best known as the uncle in Napolean Dynamite). Carson is an evil water baron who, like There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview, is drinking everyone in the valley’s milkshakes. The end game is always unclear, and therefore lowering audience buy in. But basically Carson is bad, wants all the water for himself, and will kill anyone in the valley to get it. Kendal has a plan for escape, but Carson’s marauders are always on the hunt, and a confrontation is inevitable.
Look, for as many elements that do work in The Well, enough bothersome details, exposition dumps, and character skill set reaches crop up to keep this from standing out to me as a great entry to the post-apocalyptic sub-genre. That said, I’ve seen dozens of worse post apocalypse films, and certainly feel glad to have checked this out… especially on the big screen with an excited audience at a Sci-Fi film festival! And if nothing else: It makes a damn sight more sense to set up WATER (the most essential element for all life) as the most coveted possession in the collapsed economy over fuel or dirt.
And I’m Out.