Andrés Hernández Covarrubias’s “Old Well” opens in the hush of the Veracruz mountains, where ten-year-old Susana shares a cabin with her loving father and an ever-present, almost sentient quiet. The film’s atmosphere -“threatening tranquility” is exactly right- works like a held breath. When Susana quite literally slips beneath the surface and into an abandoned well, the narrative drops with her, trading rustic stillness for a subterranean reckoning. 

At the bottom: the skeletal remains of her mother. At the top: a house of unspoken histories that can no longer hold.

The film’s most potent device is its intentional ambiguity around culpability. We do not learn who killed the mother (is it the father?), and that uncertainty refuses catharsis. Instead, “Old Well” lingers in the psychic fog that surrounds trauma in families, the glances that don’t land, the conversations that never start. That choice suits Covarrubias’s stated ambition to explore “hidden tensions and emotional scars,” and it’s here that the short comes closest to the cryptic, quietly devastating tone it seeks.

Cinematography is a clear asset and sound design supports that visual intent: wind and distant creaks stretch scenes into elastic pockets of dread. Performances, too, ground the tale. 

Victoria Vara Mendoza plays Susana with a deft mix of curiosity and withdrawal, while the father’s (Enrique Vásquez Burgos) stiffness reads as both protective and potentially incriminating, exactly the moral ambiguity the film needs.

Where “Old Well” falters is in momentum. The pacing is weak; sequences circle the same emotional pitch rather than deepening or complicating it. Editing choices tend to observe rather than probe, elegant, yes, but not as incisive as the material requires. The film wants the sensation of time folding in on itself, yet the temporal play rarely moves past tasteful ellipses. As a result, the finale lands as an echo rather than a reverberation.

Covarrubias’s director’s statement promises a heady blend of magical realism and psychological horror. 

On screen, that alchemy manifests in flashes but not in full. “Old Well” is an intriguing, handsomely crafted short whose best ideas live in the margins and in the silence between looks. It fascinates more than it haunts, commendable, above average, but not fully captivating for its genre.