The Well — a quiet descent into truth

There are films that announce themselves loudly, and others that draw you in almost imperceptibly, like a slow breath held just a little too long. The Well belongs resolutely to the second category. It is a film that trusts silence, duration, and atmosphere - an increasingly rare confidence, and one that immediately signals Samantha Lang’s mastery.

Lang, whose work has travelled the world’s most demanding festivals and whose The Well competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, crafts here a singular object: part Hitchcockian suspense, part psychological horror, part intimate family portrait. Genres are not blended so much as allowed to seep into one another, like water through stone.

What strikes first is the film’s refusal to rush. The Well takes its time looking - really looking - at Hester and her daughter Katherine. This slowness is not indulgence; it is precision. The camera observes their gestures, their silences, their mismatched rhythms. In doing so, the film allows fragility to surface without ever naming it.

Hester, restrained, religious, singing German hymns as if anchoring herself to an inherited moral gravity, stands in stark contrast to Katherine, a free spirit carried by lightness, curiosity, and a faint carelessness that feels like freedom. Between them, Lang stages a delicate choreography: a mother bound by rules and guilt, a daughter who instinctively reaches for openness and possibility. Katherine gently draws her mother toward another way of being, toward air and movement and joy. For a moment, everything seems aligned. A journey awaits - Europe, New York, the promise of renewal.

And then comes the accident.

From that moment on, the film shifts without ever announcing its turn. The well itself emerges - not merely as a location, but as a presence. A third character. Hester. Katherine. The Well. We look into it as the characters do, searching for truth, for meaning, for absolution. It becomes a mirror, an allegory: of buried secrets, of identities we suppress, of truths that can either destroy us or finally set us free.

This is where The Well transcends genre. The horror is not only what might be hidden in the dark, but what we carry within us. Lang understands that the most unsettling revelations are rarely external. They are internal, moral, emotional. The well asks an ancient question: what happens when we can no longer look away?

Visually and tonally, the film sustains a remarkable atmosphere - dense, intimate, quietly oppressive - without ever resorting to excess. The suspense is psychological, earned, and deeply human. The horror is existential. The liberation, when it comes, is ambiguous and costly.

It is therefore particularly exciting to open our first Philo Bistro of the year with Samantha Lang, revisiting The Well not simply as a film, but as a philosophical object. A work that invites us to sit with discomfort, to accept slowness, and to confront the depths we would rather keep sealed.

Some films entertain. Others linger. The Well stays with you - like a reflection glimpsed in dark water, long after you’ve stepped away.

O.-V.

Link to register for the Philo Bistro with Samantha Lang at the Alliance Francaise Sydney: https://www.afsydney.com.au/whats-on/philo-bistro/