Road to the Well
There are moments when Jon Cvack’s thriller, “Road to the Well,” feels like it will be heading into a distinctly Coen Brothers vibe as it goes through its twists and turns. Though IMDb bills it as a “comedy-drama-thriller,” the film, though its does have moments of dark humor, has more in common with the Coens’s “Blood Simple” than “Fargo” as Frank and Jack navigate having a dead body on their hands. There’s nothing wrong with that, though- Cvack’s film is a contemporary film noir, and it lands quite a few of its punches while finding its own path in that genre.
We start the film with seeing Jack (Micah Parker) as he feels detached with the people around him, including a woman he seems to be lovers with. He leaves, and the film then picks up with Frank (Laurence Fuller), who works in an office building, but is having a run of bad luck with his school prospects, and then, he is asked about taking a position up North by his boss, who also invites him to his birthday party. After work, Frank gets a call from Jack, and the two get together before heading to the birthday party, which sets forth a chain of events that leads to the dead body mentioned earlier, and having to cover the disposal of it with increasingly complicated stories.
This is a solid, smart thriller that has a very good through line narrative from where it starts to where it ends, and I enjoyed watching it. Movies like this aren’t particularly heavy when it comes to emotional weight they’re lifting, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Cvack has confidence in his story, and confidence in his characters, as they chart the path forward. This is very meat-and-potatoes filmmaking and storytelling by Cvack, and it’s quite enjoyable as such. His leads are just right for what they are asked to convey, and the key scenes they have along the way- with a friend and his fiancee at their house, and a former soldier celebrating their anniversary- give us texture and a way into figuring out the mindset of these characters without completely tipping off what may happen along the way. This is the type of film that is unassuming, and you may overlook when you first see the trailer, but, once you see it, it digs into you, and leaves a mark that is difficult to shake. That’s the type of film that’s always fun to discover, and Cvack has a good one for us here.
