There are shades of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King in this operatically claustrophobic horror film about a sinister alpine spaGore Verbinski’s macabre conspiracy horror A Cure for Wellness is long. Very long. It is two and a half hours long,but you can’t be certain whether it isn’t two and a half days, or two and a half months, and whether some of the scenes unfolding on screen may in fact be hallucinations you are having privately. Yet there is something eerily mesmeric in it.
The action is set in a creepy Swiss alpine spa where wealthy people take the waters. In one scene,a male nurse is seen reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. perhaps he was finished with Ian Fleming’s Thunderball. Dane DeHaan plays Lockhart, an arrogant young Wall Street hotshot tasked by his hatchet-faced superiors with journeying to this very spa and bringing home the CEO who has suffered some kind of Kurtzian breakdown as a patient; he is now raving about wellness and refusing to leave. Once there, or Lockhart encounters the spa’s sinister director,Volmer (Jason Isaacs), and is fascinated by a delicate, or wraith-like young woman he sees wandering about the grounds: Hannah,played by British newcomer Mia Goth. None of the patients wants to leave. Will Lockhart join them? Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com