If you could nick a David Fincher film’s throat, hang it upside down, and bleed it for two days, it would look like this movie. As a fetish object, it’s impressive.
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A Cure For Wellness (2016), All You Want To Know & Watch About A Great Movie
A Cure For Wellness
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.
A Cure for Wellness is a 2016 psychological horror film directed by Gore Verbinski and written by Justin Haythe, based on a story co-written by Haythe and Verbinski, who were both inspired by Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain. Starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs and Mia Goth, the plot follows a young executive who is sent to retrieve his company’s CEO from a mysterious rehabilitation center in the Swiss Alps.
An international co-production based in the United States, Germany, and Luxembourg,[4] the film was shot on location at various German locations, including Hohenzollern Castle in Baden-Württemberg.
The film was released on February 17, 2017 by 20th Century Fox and received generally mixed reviews from critics, who praised its visuals, cinematography, performances and ambition, but criticized its length, script and narrative. It grossed $26 million against its $40 million production budget, making it a box-office bomb. The film marked Lisa Banes’ final feature film role before her death in June 2021.
A Cure For Wellness Trailer
A Cure For Wellness Reviews
He has that look that casting directors go for when they’re hiring prep school jerks or Nazi youth. The actor’s straightforward performance, by turns entitled, baffled, terrified and ashamed, makes Lockhart a punching-bag hero, the kind who exists mainly to suffer horribly before achieving an enlightenment that looks a lot like comeuppance.
Lockhart is insufferable at first because he’s supposed to be. There’s a sense in which he deserves the miseries inflicted upon him because he’s a snotty capitalist swine who would otherwise grow up to be another Ebenezer Scrooge, and he’s representing a system that produces Scrooges by the millions. Verbinski and screenwriter Justin Haythe (“Revolutionary Road,” “The Lone Ranger”) seem at times to be making a statement about the vampire-like hold that the cultural memory of Europe still has over many rich and powerful Americans.
Lockhart’s predecessor went to the clinic “to take in the waters”—which, as another character notes, is a very nineteenth century thing to do—and the all-white denizens of the place seem awed by the very existence of Volmer, a handsome gadfly who has the chiseled looks of an old movie Gestapo officer but carries himself like an ambassador of reason.
The clinic grounds are a replica of an identical place that burned down decades ago on this very spot—there’s a backstory involving taboo hideousness—and there are recurring situations that pivot on insularity, hatred of outsiders, and the purity of bloodlines. (Mia Goth, who plays the doctor’s daughter, is the ultimate expression of the film’s anemic vision: she looks haunted and starved yet somehow also glamorous.)
This is a fine starting place for a social satire and also a fine thematic flavor for a compact, dreamy horror movie. There are real ideas here, good ideas even, but they remain tantalizing but insufficiently shaped.
It’s only during the last half-hour—a succession of over-the-top set-pieces that I loved, and that many colleagues found trashy and excessive—that “A Cure for Wellness” attains the level of bug-nuts wildness that it possibly needed all along.
Verbinski isn’t bad at psychological and atmospheric horror, but he’s often at his most original when he’s letting it all hang out in sequences of clockwork suspense and ridiculous action, which is why the slapstick sequences in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, the chases in “Rango” and the last 45 minutes of “The Lone Ranger” represent Verbinski at his most Verbinskian.
It’s in the maybe narratively-unnecessary final half-hour that “A Cure for Wellness” finally starts drawing the kinds of connections (through sheer excess) that give it a distinctive personality, such as a cut from a decadent, repulsive character whirling in circles after sustaining an injury to a group of clueless rich folk waltzing in a grand ballroom.
I could easily imagine a version of “A Cure for Wellness” that’s all suggestion and understatement, and one that’s essentially the madcap finale played out of the length of a feature, climbing to nosebleed heights of bad taste and unfurling a freak flag at the summit. Either would have been preferable to what ended up onscreen, a rag-and-bone shop of notions.
What’s most conspicuously absent here is Kubrick’s lordly, even naughty sense of humor. “A Cure for Wellness” aims for black comedy often, but rarely manages anything more sophisticated than the sick joke comic rhythm of, “What’s the worst thing that could happen to this character?” followed by, “Here it comes.” Lockhart’s suffering grows dull through repetition.
He keeps brushing up against the same realizations, onto be lied to or misdirected and find himself back where he started. Too much of this sort of thing and even patient viewers throw their hands up and moan, “Oh, come on.”
- Matt Zoller Seitz – Roger Ebert
- Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.
A Cure For Wellness Film Credits

A Cure for Wellness (2017)
146 minutes
Cast
Dane DeHaan as Mr. Lockhart
Jason Isaacs as Volmer
Mia Goth as Hannah
Carl Lumbly as Mr. Wilson
Lisa Banes as Hollis
Ivo Nandi as Enrico
Director
- Gore Verbinski
Writer (story by)
- Justin Haythe
- Gore Verbinski
Writer
- Justin Haythe
Editor
- Pete Beaudreau
- Lance Pereira
Composer
- Benjamin Wallfisch
A Cure For Wellness MOVIE INFO
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