Title: A Cure for Wellness
Synopsis: An ambitious young executive is sent to retrieve his company’s CEO from an idyllic but mysterious “wellness center” at a remote location in the Swiss Alps, but soon suspects that the spa’s treatments are not what they seem.
Release Date: February 17th, 2017 | Runtime: 2 hrs 26 min | Coolthulhus Earned: 3
Starring: Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
A Cure for Wellness Review
I’d resisted watching A Cure for Wellness for a while now. I think it’s because I knew that it wasn’t going to be my type of movie. Well, I was right. It definitely wasn’t my type of movie. But it was also one that was hard to stop watching from about the halfway point on. (I have to clarify that, because for the first half of the movie my attention was everywhere but on the movie most of the time. I was able to focus just enough to get the gist of things.)
The last half of the movie is mostly fantastic. I really felt like things were building up towards an epic ending. The pacing is perfect, the dialogue on point, and the action scenes were satisfying. And then… Alas, A Cure for Wellness is not a movie that ends with the bang it deserves. Instead, while still being gorgeous to watch, it does a side step to the right and merges from the road less traveled onto the main thoroughfare. Sigh. It would be nice if filmmakers with decent budgets could suck it up and give us movies that don’t wimp out in the end occasionally.
Torture is mentioned whenever you look up A Cure for Wellness. For the most part, the movie relies more on a creepy atmosphere than anything else. However, there definitely are torture scenes in it, albeit not nearly as many as I expected. Some of them are kind of run of the mill that play upon fears of certain types of doctors. Others are a bit more just…gross. Gross enough that my stomach turned a bit, and that’s rather a hard job to accomplish.
Gross is a very good word for a man being trapped and force fed certain slimy items, right?
The casting for A Cure for Wellness was pretty good. Jason Isaacs is, as usual, excellent at bringing charismatic toe-rags to life on the big screen. Dane DeHaan, whose face I recognized only from the Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets ads that were everywhere for a while, does a solid – if not exactly thrilling – job as the main character. Mia Goth does creepy mysterious girl well.
My favorite part of the movie was probably the cinematography. A Cure for Wellness had some absolutely breathtaking shots in it. There were several moments where I wished I could simply own a still of one particular frame. Bojan Bazelli, who has been director of photography on everything from Body Snatchers to The Ring, nailed it on pretty much every frame in this movie.
In short, A Cure for Wellness was a beautifully shot pile of “WTF?” that unexpectedly disappoints with a dose of the mundane at the very end.
We’ve avoided this and actually I don’t see us watching it anytime in the near future. In fact, we were so desperate the other night to watch something decent, we broke down and bought Alien: Covenant and paid full price – something we rarely do.
What did you think of that one?