The Well

In ‘The Well,’ André Borelli plays with the relativity of the human perception in a way filmmakers are often scared to do so. ‘The Well’ starts as a story that announces the bizarre everyday events and ends up being one of the most complete and complex theatric plays on film we have ever seen. Nothing is fortuitous, everything happens for a reason, but only at the right moment, for the right person; in a wholly distinctive way, this is the short plot description for the feature film that focuses (in a literal way) on the circular perspective over a life and its essential twist in the blink of an eye.

The first thing that we want to analyze here is one of the essential elements of this film, which is the circular frame that closes in from a wide shot. Approximately from the fifth minute until the end, the framework narrows in, and the whole visual spectrum can be seen through a small circle positioned in the middle of the standard landscape shot. We cannot emphasize enough why this is idyllic, but we will try in some rather simple methods. At first, it was quite intriguing: why the circular frame, and why does it matter if only part of the narrative goes in the spotlight, but then we remembered that this is the exact way our mind works. When we make a memory, and we are lucky enough to archive it inside our brain only for it to be opened sometime after, the overall spectrum of perception tends to become narrower with time, making us remember bits of the most important things, leaving out some details. In the same manner, in ‘The Well,’ the perception of the narrative tends to focus mostly on the key moments, leaving out the side quests or the secondary memories. Apart from the analysis we have done some lines before,  we definitely have to applaud the whole crew for making this feature stand out in such a  prolific manner. The predominant dark colors are creating a depressive mood, perfectly blended with the story that builds up in an old school way.

We recommend ‘The Well’ to anyone who finds it challenging to discover the perfect match between new and old, as this film takes on new methods to answer questions as old as humankind.