When you commit to carrying out any project, you can implement various techniques to achieve the final objective but one thing cannot and must never be missing: the essential element.

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Cinema does not escape this rule: as I have already written several times (recently in “The Watchers”), there are genres in which, regardless of the final technical quality  (direction, photography, interpretation, soundtrack, setting, VFX), an element must always be present and highlighted: the tension or even better the shudder (from the English thrill from which, consequently, the term thriller derives, i.e. to make you shiver, to constantly keep you in tension the viewer).

Genres like Horror have their backbone in the thriller element, without ifs or buts: there are films that have the ultimate aim of disgusting the viewer , others to scare him every ten minutes by making him jump from the chair and still others who frighten by creating, in the viewer's mind, night terrors which are not so easy to escape in a short time.

Each can expect certain aspects from a film belonging to this particular genre, personally I expect tension and mystery from a horror film, beyond more or less bloody, more or less explicit dismemberments: the butcher's shop does not generate tension and even less mystery (only the unrivaled “Martyrs” by Laugier succeeded)

It is said that in Italy “genre” films are no longer made and, at the same time, great importance is given to the so-called “ auteur cinema”: both labels,  created by critics and journalists, are hateful and have a divisive function (separating the mainstream from the "cultured" elite); Personally, I have never listened to these definitions because the film is a genre and an author at the same time, whatever its origin, whether popular or elitist, whether it is Science Fiction or Horror, whether it is Drama or Thriller, Action or Comedy, biographical or Adventure, etc. ..

Zampaglione's fifth work is currently in the news because, every few years, an Italian horror film comes out and all the media shout about the "risorgimento" but one swallow does not make a summer …

“The Well” has only one major flaw: there is no tension and no mystery, everything else takes second place.

As stated before, reluctantly, I cannot have a positive opinion of the film as the essential elements that make the massacres absolutely useless and non-engaging (not to mention decidedly comical) are missing.

A story that fails to create in the viewer the desire to discover what is hidden behind that painting or in those basements, monsters that more than once reminded me of those in "Silent Hill" of 2006, situations comedies from “Scary Movie” (cit. “Yes, I did it, I did it!!! I'll come back to get you!”), easily understandable backgrounds of the characters and other overused clichés that didn't excite me at all.

If I think of “Oltre il guado” by Bianchini (2013) or the “The Nest” by De Feo (2019), just to cite two examples, I think that the “resurgence” of Italian horror is still far from being realized and it is not a problem of funds but of ideas, it is not a problem of professionalism but of writing.

Zampaglione has skills but he must be able to let himself go, trying to find originality in tradition, tension in horror, avoiding being enchanted by emotionality visual of blood because it can give viewers nightmares even if no red drop is seen: The Ring and The Orphanage docet…