Dane DeHaan must retrieve his company's CEO from a creepy wellness centre in the Swiss Alps in this psychological thriller from Gore Verbinski (2002's The Ring).
When ambitious young executive Lockhart (DeHaan) arrives at the idyllic but mysterious “wellness center”, he soon suspects that the spa’s miraculous treatments are not what they seem. When he begins to unravel its terrifying secrets, his sanity is tested as he finds himself diagnosed with the same curious illness that keeps all the guests there longing for the cure.
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42%214 reviews
In struggling to come up with the best way to describe Gore Verbinski's bold new gothic horror, the term I kept returning to was “glorious mess”. There is a whole heaping pile of baroque horror insanity to enjoy here, especially if you're a fan of Verbinski's particular sense of visual lushness, but there's no denying that the threads don't quite fully connect in the way they were intended to.
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The movie deprives us of either a tragic villain or a sympathetic lead, hoping that its grab bag of squirm-inducing details ... will suffice, when in fact, they reveal how a shorter, tighter treatment ought to have done the trick.
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Dank with greenish tiled interiors and an unshakable sense of dread, this lovably icky horror film mounts a sumptuous, immersive universe, the kind that big-budgeted Hollywood rarely seems imaginative enough to try.
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"A Cure for Wellness" is a lustrous box of genre candy, the self-revealing work of an auteur who has laid bare not so much his psyche as his online streaming queue.
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There are flashes of icky Cronenbergian body horror; parallels with Park Chan-wook’s Stoker and Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, but a lack of pacing and focus defuses the meticulously styled atmosphere.
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It's an all scenery-chewing, face-melting, migraine-inducing finale that threatens to spoil all the impressive work that has gone before.
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There is tremendous visual craft and inarguable style here, but none of the discipline, the sense of pacing and proportion that would allow the filmmaker's creative instincts to soar rather than merely splutter.
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The only possible cure for A Cure for Wellness would have been for the horror film maestro Val Lewton to have been summoned from the grave to chop it down to no more than 79 minutes. And maybe not even then...
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By the time we get to the third act you’ll have either given up or be rapt in the film’s sheer lurching madness…
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A high-altitude horror – think a Bram Stoker reworking of *The Shining* or Shutter Highland – of real craft. Ultimately, though, the plot turns out to be thinner than the air.
Full reviewA Cure for Wellness is available to stream in New Zealand now on Prime Video and Apple TV.
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