Reel Time: Reflections on 'A Cure for Wellness'

So, long story short: A Cure for Wellness was sickeningly awful. And not in a good, repulsive kind of way. But if you want some genuine reflections on what was wrong and what was right and what could have been, then read on.

From A Cure for Wellness (Verbinski, 2017) shows Volmer twice reflected and refracted.
Firstly, through the glass of a sensory deprivation chamber and further reflected in the water of said chamber

To briefly summarise the plot, Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) is sent by the company board to retrieve the CEO from a mysterious spa retreat come cult in the Swiss Alps. All is not how it seems, however, and Lockhart becomes embroiled in a rescue attempt/investigative mission to 1) retrieve the boss and 2) uncover the secrets of the retreat. 

The primary problem with A Cure for Wellness is just how ambitious it is in its storytelling. After going to see the film, what became clear upon discussion was just how discordant all of the ideas and plots were and the ways in which they weren't brought together in any way. The first part of the film has the cinematic style and tone shared by the likes of Fight Club or Mr Robot. The second part, after arriving at the retreat, feels like a wannabe Shutter Island with nods to other films that utilise the concept of conspiracies in asylums and other health sites (there's a parallel to be drawn with Dr Tarr and Professor Fether, a tale by Edgar Allan Poe). This is followed up by an almost-romantic subplot with a mysterious young woman which doesn't seem far removed from the likes of Jane Eyre. And THEN The Phantom of the Opera begins. And that was when I knew this film couldn't be saved by some spectacular finish. It was all downhill from there.

The film also drops multiple side plots and storylines, many of which were never all that important in the first place. The film begins with the death of a random side character that's supposed to be some sort of inciting incident tied into the overall plot of the film (heavily suggested by the presence of water, a major symbolic element within the film). There's a second sideplot about Lockhart's mother, who resides on assisted living and supposedly dies (or does she?) at the same moment her son is in an accident himself. This plot point is never mentioned again.

A Cure for Wellness had a lot of potential. The pseudo-Fight Club vibe introduced at the beginning of the film could have offered a scathing analysis of current clean eating, exercise obsessed culture that's more about buying Nike trainers and designer gym leggings than actual health. It could have also focused on how capitalism makes us ill, and that we're all drinking the kool-aid (or water?) and going to the place where we expect everyone to be crazy could have offered an interesting inversion. The strange medieval incest/romance plot has me coming up blank and deserves to be fully and energetically axed from the entire production.

There is one saving grace for A Cure for Wellness: Bazelli's images are sublime. The most notable ones are those that utilise vision, seeing or reflections, which suggest interesting themes that never come to the surface. A Cure For Wellness uses these concepts of vision and reflection to firstly construct aesthetically appealing shots and to secondly provoke ideas of vision, duality and multiplicity.

Reflections in the water at the wellness
retreat in the Swiss Alps from A Cure for
Wellness (2017)

Reflection is found in most shots that use mirrors, windows or other reflective surfaces, like bodies of water (see left). Historically and generally speaking, mirrors and reflections on film signify some sort of inverted world or duplication of the world we're in. These images lend themselves nicely to what this film could have been had the story been nicely managed. Relationships between sanity and insanity are particularly suited to the use of reflection, as the two perspectives of the world are often directly oppositional variations of the same reality.

Vision is also questioned in these images, which warp either the world seen or the eyes themselves. One of the best shots of the entire film is the shot of Volmer's (Jason Isaacs) office reflected in the eye of a mounted animal head (below) which literally warps the scene that is about to occur to the curvature of the glass eye. There's also something to be said for the passivity of the mounted head which cannot actually see - rather it seems to reflect in place of seeing. Another outstanding shot, which is surprisingly absent from the internet, occurs early in the film wherein Lockhart's mother uses a magnifying glass to see the doll figurines she painted. Leaving the glass in front of her face in the shot, her entire face is swallowed by the giant eye in the glass, making vision disproportionately important. 

Volmer's office reflected in the eye of a mounted animal head

These shots gave me initial excitement for the film, and disproportionate hope that the film I wasn't convinced by was going to win me over with a grand finale where it all made sense. Unfortunately, the hope they gave me was false indeed. Where they initially suggested the existence of multiple realities, perspectives or subjectivity of characters and their ideas, what I got instead was a confused mess of concepts that never quite tied together yet still wanted to appear as sophisticated as other movies in the "mindfuck" genre (a la Shutter Island or Inception). 

A Cure for Wellness is, then, an unfortunate miss in terms of story which fails to make the most of its rich cinematography and a premise full of potential. It is, however, the best kind of failure: too ambitious, too many ideas, too many directions to go in and just not quite enough follow through that tries its hardest to do something different.

(If you share my opinion or even hated the film more than me, you should check out Umashin's blog because he hated it too)