A Cure for Wellness

Gore Verbinski on drugs? A third clone of Shutter Island, more confused than Stonehearst Asylum and bizarrely mixed with The Abominable Dr. Phibes? I understand the intention to create a B-movie guilty pleasure with a lavish budget. Mysteriousness and unpredictability work at least for the first half of the movie. But it all turns ridiculous in the end. Dane DeHaan was certainly looking forward to his first big lead role, but he won’t break through with this one. Interesting posters, an unclear target audience, all resulting in a fiasco. I want a more intimate version of this from Roman Polanski without CGI. (02/20/2017)

This horror movie, A Cure for Wellness uses a carefully constructed atmosphere to get under your skin. However, as the story moves into the second half, it begins to lose a little of its initial charm, shrouded in sinister mystery. Nevertheless, I was not bored at all, on the contrary, the plot absolutely absorbed me. In addition, I was absolutely captivated by the beautiful mountain locations where the filming took place. Personally, however, I would have liked a more sophisticated solution to the mystery. (75%) (12/10/2022)

It's delightfully filmed weirdness - after Crimson Peak, another horror film that's not very usual for the contemporary viewer (even the genre classification here doesn't know how to deal with it :)), but which perfectly had me in the palm of its hand. First of all, it was able to surprise me with something every now and then, which was probably the best of all. Priessnitz never dreamed of such a hydrotherapy, and I, who was so bored by Shutter Island, probably didn't dream of such a film either. (02/22/2017)

The film builds up and escalates quite well, but after a while, you realize it's been building up for too long. Verbinski probably realized that too, hence he inserts drastic, often really gruesome scenes into the film A Cure for Wellness, which appropriately affect you. Especially those dental scenes are exceptionally well executed and extremely gruesome. And then there are the eels... Good scenes, nice atmosphere, but without really managing to captivate you as much as you might expect. I didn’t like the ending. (08/05/2017)

The atmosphere will purify you like Professor Volmer's famous water. The first 15 minutes or so are pure ecstasy. Like a gothic horror from Sorrentino. For about an hour, A Cure for Wellness keeps you suspecting that it is coming up with a clever metaphor for a world plagued by the cancer of ambition and mammon. Of course, nothing like that happens. The screenplay has multiple sclerosis, so it dissipates the quite primitive incestuous story so perfectly along the way that in the end it doesn't make much sense. But it does not matter. This film loses its sanity as amusingly as the main character, and the ball ending is something that died out in Hollywood in the 1930s. And Verbinski pulls it out of the coffin, as if it were a graceful quail. Necrophilia intercourse with everything. Unjust, insane, sometimes almost stupid... but incredibly fun. Do you know where the alpine water can be bought? (02/16/2017)