The Well: Dipping Back in For One More Dystopian Drama
By Chris Knight
Rating: B
I’ve seen so many Canadian post-apocalyptic dramas in the last two years that they’re starting to fuse and confuse.
Even the casts are overlapping. When Sheila McCarthy popped up in the middle of The Well, I was reminded of her performance in All the Lost Ones, though the two characters turn out to be polar opposites.
The Well is a lesser entry in the genre when stacked up against such recent fare as 40 Acres, Can I Get a Witness?, and Rumours. It starts out in a style we’ve seen before — a montage of vague news reports suggesting that something is wrong with Earth’s water, and that its scarcity is tearing society apart.
From there we meet Paul and Elisha and their daughter Sarah (Arnold Pinnock, Joanne Boland, and Shailyn Pierre-Dixon, respectively), who are living — I was going to say off the grid, but there is no grid to live on anymore.
They dress in a style we’ll call dystopian thrift store chic, and their subsistence farm is aided by the presence of a well that offers clean water, whereas most rivers and streams are infected with a deadly virus.
Things get complicated when a stranger — or is he a long-lost relation? — stumbles into their property. Then the well’s intake breaks, and newcomer Jamie (Idrissa Sanogo Bamba) heads out in the middle of the night to find a replacement part. Sarah sneaks off with him. Paul follows, concerned.
It’s a busy, bustling plot, especially when Jamie and Sarah find the ragtag community that used to be his home, run by a quietly menacing despot named Gabriel (McCarthy). Others in the camp include a jealous youth, a twitchy water expert and a new mother, but director Hubert Davis doesn’t seem certain which of them deserves the most focus and screen time, with the result that all end up feeling underdeveloped.
Worse, we keep leaving them to catch up with Paul, who is searching for his daughter (never quite sure how close he is to finding her) and running into trouble along the way.
I had high hopes for this latest end-times tale — it’s a genre I tend to enjoy, ironic as that may seem. And there is much to appreciate here, not least the performances, all of them strong, and no less than McCarthy, whose rare turn as a villain is wonderfully against type.
But everything else hits just shy of the mark. The environmental disaster and its societal effects are never more than sketched in, hinted at more in the production design — lots of rusting industrial ruins and rebounding wilderness — than the writing. The underlying motivations of the main characters remain similarly vague.
Davis is an Oscar-nominated documentary director, though he has made two fiction films this past year, the other being the hockey drama Youngblood. Here’s hoping his next is just a little deeper than The Well.
The Well. Directed by Hubert Davis. Starring Arnold Pinnock, Shailyn Pierre-Dixon, and Idrissa Sanogo Bamba. In theatres January 23.