A Cure For Wellness Review

A-Cure-For-Wellness

How well are you?

Judging by the nationalistic sickness spreading around the world these days, it’s a pertinent question – yet one that Gore Verbinski doesn’t really answer in A Cure For Wellness.

Lockhart is a high flying financial hotshot, with a new promotion and a high-rise corner office to boot.

But his ambition compelled him to cut corners on his way to the top and, now his superiors have found out, they use this as leverage to task him with an offer he dare not refuse.

Visit some Swiss spa resort and bring back their absent CEO.

First world problems, huh.

But retrieving his chief may be easier said than done, as he’s very happy to stay in this mountain retreat and continue his search for wellness.

Something’s not quite right about this resort though; stories of a baron and his sister being burned alive up there have passed into local folklore, and a strangeness persists among patients and doctors.

And the longer Lockhart stays, the more curious events become.

A Cure For Wellness is a schizophrenic kind of film.

It starts off as a vague sort of warning against the capitalist way of life we’re all taught to aspire to have, where monetary value is a signifier of our own success and status within society.

And if you stop wanting to make as much money as you possibly can, well then there must be something wrong with you.

Like me.

Now, this is an interesting idea for a big budget Hollywood film, especially as we’re becoming increasingly aware that humanity seems hellbent on jeopardising our own future in the name of profit and greed.

Alas, Verbinski decides to add a gothic element to proceedings – which is no bad thing in itself, but it ends up being the dominant theme.

It all works well enough for the first two acts of A Cure For Wellness, as the immaculately shot and scored sequences draw you into this forensically conceived spa oddity.

But the third act somewhat jumps the shark, as believable reality gives way to far fetched farce and Verbinski lives up to his name by reaching for a gory ending instead of following through with his earlier and more interesting theme.

A Cure For Wellness is still an entertaining watch though, with Dane DeHaan and the perfectly monikered newcomer Mia Goth to the fore.

It’s just not quite sick enough for what ails me.

Jonathan Campbell

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February 2017
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