Review of A Cure for Wellness (2017) by Clare L — 21 Mar 2017

This movie needs All The Trigger Warnings. What started out as a masterfully set, atmospherically creepy slow-build mystery abruptly turned into a full-out rape scene/body horror/torture extravaganza about two hours in.

It's a good film to see if you enjoy creepy atmosphere, morbid curiosity, and pseudo-European meditations on life. And if there is literally nothing that will give you nightmares.

I enjoyed the first two hours or so of superbly creepy scene-setting, fairly intense acting, and a plot which wove together themes of capitalism, morality, and mortality with surprising complexity.

The film definitely had the "creepy down" well, managing to put onto screen all sorts of difficult-to-articulate morbid fascinations.

But the last half hour was like a different movie. Gone was all subtlety! Creepy atmospheric scene-setting was replaced by explicit gruesome sequences, some of which were both so long and so cliched that at some point they crossed the border from "really uncomfortable" into "hilariously bad.".

It's probably a bad sign when the audience is laughing at what is supposed to be a horrific/dramatic climax because everything that's happened in the past five minutes has been so over-the-top and predictable.

The ending felt particularly abrupt and poorly thought-out given the amount of slow-build puzzle-piecing that went into creating the movie's setting. All of that was summarily dumped out of the window in favor of an ending that, while not implausible, wasn't logical enough to be really satisfying.

That being said - I did enjoy the first two hours. Would probably endure the ending again if I had to - provided I was alone and didn't have to worry about accidentally exposing others to nightmare fuel.