Review of A Cure for Wellness (2017) by Ann B — 13 Jun 2017

I rarely hate a movie so deeply.

To explain myself, i'll say that I was extremely excited to see this movie: the trailer hiked my expectations to the sky. A cure for wellness showed potential for a stylistic masterpiece, and flopped as the horribly acted, horribly scripted wannabe-story mess it is.

Firstly, the set design, the soundtrack, the visual experience in general was everything I wanted it to be. Eerie, hauntingly beautiful, sinister, and captivating. But everything else truly disappointed that stylistic potential.

Dehaan is TERRIBLE in the role. Giving a joke of a performance as the almost comically static lead. The singular emotion he can show is that furrowed-brow aggravation. In scenes where I feel tension, places where any well acted human would show fear--Dehaan misses all those marks.

I hate so much about this movie. A Cure for Wellness feels the need to intentionally hand-hold moviegoers as if they cannot develop thoughts on their own, forcefully mouth-feeding all of the plot to viewers in a painful, obvious script.

Overall, A Cure for Wellness is haughty, crossing well over the "ambitious" line and diving head first into excessive and unnecessary. It opts to gross viewers out through rape, period pools, eel waterboarding, random jerk-off scenes for an easy "ew," rather than any real suspense or mystery, which the story completely lacks. The superfluous allegories scattered across the film: the cliche deer symbolism, "The ballerina is Hanna! Look, they are both dancing! See it? Can you see it? Do you get it?" and all those random, jumbled cut-scenes of eels. Never adding any real meaning to the plot, and far more likely confusing viewers than establishing any sort of atmospheric suspense.

Directed as if viewers would somehow easily be fooled into seeing a deeper meaning in all that irrelevant symbolism and hiding behind (deceivingly) stunning visuals, A Cure for Wellness wants to be more sophisticated than what it really is: horrible.