A Cure For Wellness Is the Horror Movie We Deserve – New Republic

The reason for the eels is pretty complicated, and to discover the secret of their origin Lockhart enlists the help of the Goth and a guest named Victoria Watkins (the sparkling Celia Imrie). When Lockhart first arrived at the sanatorium two large wrought-iron gates parted: Two intertwined Hippocratic snakes broke apart. They were eels all along, the viewer realizes. The doctors oath to do no harm perhaps does not apply when the snakes are actually eels.

Eels are a good horror movie creature. Theyre not overdone, like sharks or snakes, but theyre no less wriggly and disgusting. They are the literal something in the water. Theres something phallic to their shape, and the eels in this movie seem destined for human orifices. Theyre slippery and fishy and serpentine all at once. They get under ones skin.

But the eels are only one of the Freudian melodies haunting A Cure for Wellness. The movie is rife with complexes, notably around incest. It is no great spoiler to say that the whole sanatoriums grotesque enterprise is driven by a mysterious phenomenon lurking underneath it: a dark, horrible, underground id.

A Cure for Wellness certainly engages with a lot of traditions. Structurally, the movie combines Henry Jamess The Ambassadors with Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain with Ford Madox Fords The Good Soldier. But this promising premise is sadly betrayed by a series of plot twists that render A Cure for Wellness more like The Phantom of the Opera than anything else.

The poor ending is a great shame. For Verbinski calls upon a great pantheon of stories in order to talk about daddy issues, yes, but more importantly to talk about capitalism. In the movie, two strains of moneymaking compete. Financial services go up against the wellness industry in a fully binaristic duel: city versus mountaintop, suit versus white coat, aggression versus docility.

Both industries exploit those they profit from, and A Cure for Wellness is at its best when showing how contemporary philosophies of health and wealth are, at base, all the same old sin. By throwing in some Nazi overtones via blond haircuts and Marathon Man references, Verbinski firmly connects contemporary Californian wellness bullshit to the nastiest of European body-narratives.

What should we make of a movie which is two-thirds good, one-third terrible? When its the last third that disappoints, it sticks to the viewer as she walks out the cinema. This particular poor ending felt like a betrayal, since it wrenches A Cure for Wellness fully out of its original genre and into melodrama. The ending hangs like an arm dislocated from its shoulder, its owner already forgetting not to trust the doctors.

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A Cure For Wellness Is the Horror Movie We Deserve - New Republic

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero