A Cure for Wellness (1 Viewer)

[steve jaros]

This is a LONG dirge of a movie. Yes, the scenery is beautiful and the director captures a certain gloomy mood at times, but for most of its 2 1/2 hours, ACFW is a pedestrian asylum-horror story of the kind we've seen many times before. Director Gore Verbinski struck diamonds a decade ago with the Pirates of the Caribbean series, but IIRC he also made the Lone Ranger a few years back, so this might be the last time he gets to helm a film of this size.

The casting, featuring two erstwhile models turned actors, Mia Goth and Dane Dehaan, doesn't help. Goth is a minor league Kate Moss and DeHaan is a pale facsimile of Leo Dicaprio. Neither conveys any charisma, and given the flimsy and predictable story, if ACFW was going to be saved the actors had to save it.

I wasted 140 minutes of my life this afternoon. I recommend you don't, LOL.

36/100

 

[EricSchulz]

I tend to check out most horror films when they hit Amazon/Netflix since I've been burned SO MANY TIMES by hype surrounding new releases. Thanks for the heads up!

 

[Malcolm R]

The reviews I've seen so far are pretty dire.

 

[TravisR]

The massive run time has me worried but I'll probably check it out tomorrow or Sunday.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

I thought the marketing campaign for this movie was a work of art, and the trailers maximized the film's atmospheric visuals to generate a sense of dread.

Unfortunately, the movie itself doesn't live up to the advertising. The film is beautiful to look at, but it's not especially scary. And it's about an hour too long. I figured out what was going on about halfway through, and then had to slog through a long stretch of DeHaan wandering through the sanitarium before the movie caught up. And when things finally do play out to their inevitable conclusion, the result is often unintentionally funny instead of horrifying.

I predict the movie will gain a following on the sheer merit of the visuals alone, but there's very little else to recommend it.

 

[Lord Dalek]

Cure for Wellness officially 2017's first major box office bomb. Only $4.2 Million from 2,700 screens.

 

[TravisR]

I hated this movie. It's a bad episode of The Twilight Zone but nearly 6(!) times longer than an episode of TZ.

I don't understand how a studio read this bloated, boring and ugly script and gave it the greenlight. Fox should have cut the script in half and spent the money 'saved' on a sure thing like Deadpool 2 or advertising on Logan or gave it to a soup kitchen. Hell, a bonus for some exec would have been a better use of the money.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I'm with Adam on this one. Beautiful visuals and not much else.

It was so easy to figure out, and so long. There's probably an effective version of this story that would work at 90 minutes, but 2 1/2 hours was unmercifully long.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

So, I just discovered this film came and went at the theater and I did not even know. I thought this had yet to be released. I wanted to see this in a theater because it is shot on real locations, it is not CGI, and it is supposed to be visually very impressive.

I guess I have to wait for the blu-ray.

 

[benbess]

The blu-ray for this was on sale for about $5 a while ago and so I decided to give it a try, since I tend to like movies about mental illness. I agree that it's too long, but the visuals are often quite good. I liked it better than most people here just because it's different than the average horror movie. Here's a quote from the review in the New York Times....

"....two and a half hours may be more of this kind of fun than a body can stand. You might feel like you’re in the company of a manic cinephile friend breathlessly recounting his favorite movie scenes in no particular order. You admire his devotion, his taste and his scholarship, but in the end the experience is probably more satisfying for him than it is for you...."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/movies/a-cure-for-wellness-review.html?_r=0

PS It apparently lost money. I wonder what Gore Verbinski is doing next?

A Cure for Wellness
Domestic Total Gross: $8,106,986
Distributor: Fox Release Date: February 17, 2017
Genre: Horror Runtime: 2 hrs. 26 min.
MPAA Rating: R Production Budget: $40 million
Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: $8,106,986 30.5%
+ Foreign: $18,513,016 69.5%
= Worldwide: $26,620,002

 

[Neil Middlemiss]

You're not alone I watched this film for the 2017 Halloween Movie challenge and had the following to say about it:

A Cure for Wellness (2016) 3.5 out of 5 - First Time Viewing

An ambitious, increasingly successful corporate worker is dispatched to Switzerland to escort the company's CEO back from a 'health retreat' to help close an important merger deal, but the worker gets more than he bargained for at the falsely peaceful, tranquil retreat nestled among the beautiful Swiss mountains.

A Cure for Wellness was a failure at the box office and I can understand why, but that's not a commentary on the quality of the film. I rather liked it. Directed by Gore Verbinksi, who gave us The Ring, Mousehunt, and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the man has a technical brilliance help that make his films a joy to look at. In this film, he present a highly unusual, beautifully photographed mash-up of the mysterious, curious, bizarre and horrific that I'm not really sure who they thought it would most appeal to.

It stars Dane Dehaan (Chronicle) as the cut-throat corporate upstart who realized quite quickly that things aren't quite as they seem. He's rather good in the role which calls for us to dislike him but feel for him and ultimately root for him. Not easy. The film presents a wonderful contradiction of settings that feel like 18th century, with flashes of the modern world, and a timeless, idyllic setting. And it unfolds very slowly, patiently wandering through the quirks and giving us oddball visuals that may or may not be real. It's the oddities, and the captivatingly odd behaviors, that serve as the fun draw, but the film ultimately fails to deliver satisfactorily - in other words, when all is revealed, it's not nearly is as interesting or original as it could have been. This is a film where the journey is absolutely more interesting than the destination.

It's superbly produced, but isn't weighty enough in its reveal to make a lasting impact. Still, I enjoyed the heck out of how it looked.

 

[benbess]

....The film presents a wonderful contradiction of settings that feel like 18th century, with flashes of the modern world, and a timeless, idyllic setting. And it unfolds very slowly, patiently wandering through the quirks and giving us oddball visuals that may or may not be real. It's the oddities, and the captivatingly odd behaviors, that serve as the fun draw, but the film ultimately fails to deliver satisfactorily - in other words, when all is revealed, it's not nearly is as interesting or original as it could have been. This is a film where the journey is absolutely more interesting than the destination....

Well said. I agree. But....

Spoiler

What if the whole reveal was a hallucination. My feeling is that somewhat like Shutter Island that most of this movie was from the drugged, traumatized, and brain damaged mind of someone who has lost it completely. I'm not sure if we can be sure if anything after the car accident was really real from the pov of the movie.

 

[benbess]

It's not as good as Cronenberg's eXistenZ, but somewhat similar imho.

Spoiler

At the end of eXistenZ are they really awake? As Poe once wrote, "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." Maybe that's what's going on with A Cure for Wellness. Would all of those greedy NYC execs go to Switzerland as shown at the end? Seems maybe the fevered nightmare of a mind that's lost. Childhood trauma and other things perhaps have caused a psychotic break?

 

[Neil Middlemiss]

Well said. I agree. But....

Spoiler

What if the whole reveal was a hallucination. My feeling is that somewhat like Shutter Island that most of this movie was from the drugged, traumatized, and brain damaged mind of someone who has lost it completely. I'm not sure if we can be sure if anything after the car accident was really real from the pov of the movie.

I like the notion, but don’t think the film really goes for that kind of ending, but rather arrives at a damning statement on the dependency of mock cures for a million ailments (self medication). A little on the nose, but if there was subtext, it didn’t resonate with me. (And the other movie you mentioned with that ending was superb. I reviewed that for HTF as I recall)

 

[Neil Middlemiss]

It's not as good as Cronenberg's eXistenZ, but somewhat similar imho.

Spoiler

At the end of eXistenZ are they really awake? As Poe once wrote, "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." Maybe that's what's going on with A Cure for Wellness. Would all of those greedy NYC execs go to Switzerland as shown at the end? Seems maybe the fevered nightmare of a mind that's lost. Childhood trauma and other things perhaps have caused a psychotic break?

It has been years since I saw eXistenZ. I need to revisit that one soon !