Review: The Well – “an Old School Italian horror-style offering.”

Directed by Federico Zampaglione
Starring Lauren LaVera, Claudio Gerini, Gianluigi Calvani, Linda Zampaglione

I’ve been hearing about Zampaglione’s The Well on the film festival circuit, and was lucky enough to be sent a screener. It starts with a young woman, Lisa (Lauren LaVera), travelling by herself to a remote Italian village. Along the way she meets a group of other young people, who are going to the woods near the village to conduct some research; all slightly adrift in a foreign land, they bond and make promises to catch up with one another in a few days in the village, when they have finished their respective jobs.

Lisa is the daughter of a famous art restorer, the one any rich collector turns to when needed. Normally overshadowed by her famous father, here he is not available, so she has been sent for some emergency restoration work for the local duchess, Emma (John Wick 2’s Claudio Gerini). A large oil painting above a fireplace has been damaged, and an important international auction is coming up, so there’s a lot of money involved, hence the rush job. Lisa protests that this kind of delicate work cannot be rushed, but the countess insists, and then reminds her there is a penalty clause if she fails, one which could bankrupt her father’s business, so she has no choice.

Naturally, as many of my fellow horror hounds will have guessed, the auction is a ruse, and the painting is tied to a secret ritual which needs to be carried out by a specific evening. As Lisa begins to gently clean soot and other detritus from the painting, she is quite upset as some of the disturbing imagery it slowly reveals, piece by piece, imagery which seems to be leaking into her dreams, creating nightmarish images. Are they just dreams from the stress of work and being alone in a strange place with the enigmatic duchess and her peculiar daughter (Linda Zampaglione), or are they harbingers of something more?

Meanwhile, the group of young researchers Lisa befriended at the start of the film have been attacked and kidnapped, dragged to a hidden torture chamber, which just happens to sit in the old dungeon levels well below the home of the duchess. Overseen by a lumbering, slow but brutal ogre of a man, each of them is brutalised in turn, before being dropped down the titular well, where something is waiting to finish them off…

This is very much an Old School Italian horror-style offering, very much in the vein of the 1970s and 80s horrors and Giallos by Bava, Argento et al. And like those, it really doesn’t always quite make sense! But also like those, it is stylish, so you don’t really mind that too much at all – there’s enough there to give you the main idea: possibly cursed painting, a secret ritual, a potential bit of Elisabeth Bathory influence. And some truly gruesome, downright nasty deaths, usually prefaced by brutal wounds, spaced out across the film so it doesn’t come across as too much (although I couldn’t help but note that the most protracted and nastiest death scene was for the one black woman in the cast, who endures the worst for quite sometime before death). And again, like some of those 70s and 80s films, the gore is extreme but sometimes ludicrously so.

Despite a bunch of flaws, I really enjoyed this, mostly because, well, I love those 1970s and 80s Italian horrors, with all their silliness, lack of narrative clarity and OTT death and injury scenes. If, like me, you loved the films of Argento, Bava, Fulci et all, this is just a terrific night’s retro-tinged Italian horror for you to enjoy. The next festival screening is in October for Manchester’s Grimmfest.