Movie Review: The Devil’s Well (2018)

The Devil’s Well is a documentary found-footage style horror film written and directed by Kurtis Spieler. It starts off with Bryan and Karla who are a husband & wife who do paranormal investigations, and want to investigate a place called “The Devil’s Well”. The well itself is in the basement of an abandoned building and is supposedly the gateway to hell. Weird place to put the gateway to hell, but that probably makes the property value fluctuate depending on the buyer. Karla disappears during the investigation and Bryan gets arrested as a suspect in her disappearance. Obviously, they don’t buy the story Bryan is selling, and he goes back a year later with a team to investigate more to prove it.

The film is a bit slow, with most of it just being dialogue while they travel through the basement as some of the team watch from the equipment they brought with them to the building. There weren’t a lot of scares, and the film seemed to struggle to keep the tension. With that being said, the production quality was great. The found-footage style really worked well here, the sound was well done for being in a basement most of the film, and the acting wasn’t bad either.

As far as the writing goes, we thought that this concept could have used a bit more originality. The evil well, and found footage concept mashed together made it seem very Blair Witch meets The Ring film, and even though the story was a bit different, the concepts have been done quite a lot. The ending also wasn’t very surprising, and when you do a found-footage film these days, you really need to make it your own for it to work well.

Overall, this was a decent film for it only being Spieler’s second feature, and while it has been done before, it was executed well here. If you are into found-footage films we would say it’s worth a watch.