Fantasia 2025 Review: THE WELL, In A World Where Water Is Scarce, A Young Girl Is Her Family's Only Hope

In a not-too-distant future where clean water is scarce, a young woman’s journey to find a way to fix her family’s well leads her to a group of struggling survivors who would do anything to have what she has in director Hubert Davis’s, The Well.

Opening with a chaotic collage of overlapping doomsday news reports outlining the existential water crisis facing the Earth, The Well wastes no time setting the scene. Teenage Sarah (Shailyn Pierre-Dixon) and her parents, Paul (Arnold Pinnock) and Elisha (Joanne Boland) live a guarded life at a country cabin, a family homestead which just happens to have a well that miraculously provides a steady supply of clean water, a valuable commodity in these times. While the world around them scrapes for every drop, their good fortune has made them cautious, spending the majority of their time checking the various traps and alerts they’ve set up in the woods to keep them safe from those who want what they have.

When a young man stumbles out of the woods onto their land claiming to be a Sarah’s long-thought-dead cousin, Jamie (Idrissa Sanogo), Mom is hesitant to take him at his word. They relent and Jamie joins their bubble, but when a broken part turns the well’s seemingly endless supply to mud, Sarah and Jamie take it upon themselves to step into the forest and hunt for a solution. What they find is a camp of desperate survivors, lorded over by Gabriel (Sheila McCarthy), a smooth-talking woman who keeps the small crew of subordinates in line.

As Sarah’s stay grows uncomfortably long, she is eager to return to her parents – who are equally worried about her since she didn’t bother telling them she was leaving. However, Gabriel has other ideas about Sarah and what she represents, and as the desperation in both women grows, it becomes clear that there must be a winner and a loser in this fight. Who comes out of top is yet to be seen.

Not terribly dissimilar to this year’s post-apocalyptic critical favorite 40 Acres, The Well is a story with long, deep roots in speculative fiction. As we in the real-world experience scarcity of resources, increasingly harmful levels of pollution rendering the environment more toxic with every passing day, and in the US, a president who openly fantasizes about annexing foreign territories for their natural resources, a film like The Well has never been more prescient than it is today.

What separates The Well from a lot of its comparable film brethren is the focus on the family drama rather than flashy sci-fi dystopian futurism (Mad Max, Tank Girl) or brutal action (40 Acres). This film is a story about the rest of us, not the maniacal leaders or the gung-ho rebels, the families who simply want to live peacefully and cherish safety and calm when they find it. It’s about the lengths to which ordinary people will go to maintain their piece of peace, and the performances by the uniformly strong ensemble cast go a long way to selling the drama while still expressing the desperation in their situation.

Like the world it inhabits, The Well is a film that thrives on a sparse aesthetic. What flourish there is in the film is largely narrative, as the imagery tells a tale of a world in which there is no time or energy to spare. Muted colors, shadows, whispers, and the claustrophobic forest where no one knows what dangers hide beneath the leaf-covered ground do more to set the tone than a bunch of fancy camera moves could ever hope to do. The Well is efficient, wasting no resources and using all of its energy to focus on Sarah and Jamie’s potentially doomed odyssey to save their family.

There was a time where a film like The Well, in spite of its deadly serious tone, could be enjoyed as science fiction fantasy. Sadly, it feels more like a window into a future toward which we are accelerating by the day. Davis’s confident direction and the cast, Pierre-Dixon in particular, do an excellent job of maintaining the film’s rather dour tone without sacrificing the engaging drama. Though it’s perhaps too similar to other films in its setting to really break out in a big way, The Well is successful on its own terms, and time will tell if that’s enough to make it stick.