El Pozo
2023 · 12m · Venezuela
Directed by John Petrizzelli
Genres: drama, fantasy, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, mythic
In a drought-stricken Spanish town awaiting Saint Isidro's miracle of rain, a creature emerging from a well is read as the devil's envoy, turning water into the origin of the cursed.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's doing folk horror now, but Petrizzelli actually inverts the setup—the miracle becomes the curse, the salvation becomes the contamination—which is refreshingly bleak, though it still lands exactly where you'd expect a reversal to land.
The film locates itself precisely within a lineage of Catholic-inflected European horror (Bresson, early Guadagnino) and executes that tradition with formal discipline—the well as both architectural center and symbolic axis, the creature as theological problem rather than monster, everything in service of the image.
The decision to keep the creature mostly unseen, letting dread build through reaction shots and the slow contamination of water itself, does more work than any elaborate prosthetics could; that restraint is what makes the 12 minutes feel genuinely mythic rather than just atmospheric.
Reviews
Este contraste entre lo sagrado y lo maldito, nos lleva a reflexionar sobre cómo lo diferente o lo desconocido puede desatar distintas acciones humanas, incluso en comunidades que se creen guiadas por lo sagrado, siendo de forma muy sutil una crítica a la intolerancia y a la rigidez de la fe cuando se enfrenta a lo inexplicable.