A Cure for Wellness: Don't Trust Swiss Germans!

"He seems to have caught hydrophobia," the medical director said, as they hurried toward the medical center. [...] "He doesn't have any physical problems, and his brain and other organs have not been damaged at all. It's just that he's afraid of the water, like someone with rabies. He refuses to drink, and he won't even eat moist food. It's an entirely psychological effect. He just believes that water is toxic."

[...] On the table stood a glass of clear water. He picked up the glass and slowly drew it to his lips and took a sip. His movements were relaxed and he wore an expression of quiet calm. Everyone began to sigh with relief, but then they noticed that his throat wasn't moving to swallow the water. The muscles of his face stiffened and then twitched slightly upward, and into his eyes came the same fear Subject 104 exhibited, as if his spirit was fighting with some powerful, shapeless force. Finally he spat out all of the water in his mouth and knelt down to vomit, but nothing came out. His face turned purple.

THE DARK FOREST by Cixin Liu

In A Cure for Wellness, water is not the force of life but an omen of death –– or something much worse. The cold beads that cling to the sides of jugfuls of ice-cold water are transparent, but here, transparency is not honesty and purity. Rather, it is simply a more clever way to hide things that are minuscule and move swiftly. The patients are encouraged to stay hydrated all throughout their stay, and yet their dental records are consistent with the symptoms of severe dehydration. Eels run their clammy, phallic selves all over your skin, though you don't feel it at first –– only ripples of watery currents.

Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

In one scene, Pembroke comments that modern medicine fixates too much on blood; our bodies are 65% water. Yet Hannah, whose bare feet are always damp, ventures into the pool and begins to bleed. The blood, dark and pruny red, dissipates into the swimming pool like smoke rising into the skies. There are small eels and large eels and baby eels, and they swim inside the patients' bulging veins. And there is glass: again, transparent, but excruciatingly so. There is plastic and glass and computer screens and liquids, all reflecting and showing, placing images on top of one another. All unreal images. Hannah's name is a palindrome; it reflects itself and can be repeated again, over and over, just as the threads of history are retraced. There's something in the water.

Dane Dehaan is the perfect man for this role. I cannot imagine anyone else playing Lockhart.

His natural skin tone is agonisingly pale; he looks like a dead man walking. In those white clothes that start out crisp and end up damp and filthy, his skin is almost like paper, almost translucent, with just a subtle note of color –– not a healthy, vital red or pink but more of an orange color, like preserved peaches. When outside, his pallor complements and contrasts the vividly beautiful Swiss landscapes. His grey eyes seem to have been made to melt into the sky. His arms are leanly muscular, and, as he drags himself along (with an inspiring amount of stamina) the shadows on his back knead themselves around smoothly. But his torso is pastier –– no abs and no hair –– and a little bit of belly when he sits down next to Pembroke in the yellowish-gray sauna that works with the warmish tint of his lips in the same way two colors interact on a Rothko canvas.

On an aesthetic basis, A Cure for Wellness is absolutely delightful. It's creepy and gross and beautiful.  It's poetic, with the undercurrent of water (no pun intended) that runs through the whole film and is ultimately vanquished by a blazing fire, and with a present so utterly imbued with echoes of the past. But this poeticness is also its biggest weakness. When it comes down to it, A Cure for Wellness is a film that takes itself far too seriously. It tries to be intelligent but falls short. The audience figures out the secret quite early on, but the film drags out the reveal and overexplains some things. In the final faceoff, the villain looks like Hugo Weaving in Captain America: The First Avenger, turning the ending into a pseudo-superheroic, cheesy farce. It also has a bit of a Michael Jackson's Thriller element to it, and wasn't really what I was expecting. The ending tries to raise questions à la Inception but there aren't really any questions to raise –– it would have been better off ending with something clean and clear. I haven't seen Shutter Island, but I did read the plot on Wikipedia (as I always do) and this film tries to be it, but isn't able to. The thematic motif of water is so hammered in that it starts to be annoying. As is the ballerina who is dreaming but doesn't know it.

And whilst some things are overexplained, others are never resolved. Ideas are thrown around, juggled, played with, but ultimately don't seem to have any real impact. Lockhart's relationship with both his mother and his father could have been developed further and fleshed out more. They contribute to his guilt and his mother's death has a muddled timeline that makes for an interesting montage, but the parents are pretty much forgotten in the second half of the film, with moments played over and over again like a broken record. The eels are never really explained. Neither is the reason why the old people stood up and converged onto Lockhart like zombies. And the music was nothing special. It was a bit cheaply used sometimes, to make a scene feel more dramatic than it really was. And although reviews I'd read beforehand promised no jumpscares, the music did startle me a couple of times and that's annoying. The only time the music was interesting was during the wedding scene. Also, the weird sex thing near the beginning was just weird and quite unnecessary. It was just used as a convenient plot device and for shock factor; please see Park Chan-wook for weird sex stuff done well and for a reason.

And yet I didn't really think it was that bad of a film. I went into it thinking I wasn't gonna like it, but I actually quite enjoyed it. I feel like a philistine for that. Critics have given this around 40% but I'd give it 50-60%. Seb, who went to see it with me, liked it less than he thought it would, so I look forward to reading his blog post. (Edit: Seb's post takes it from a different angle and is very insightful and interesting!)

All in all, I'm glad I went to see A Cure for Wellness. I'm very bad with scary movies, but this was okay. I admit I closed my eyes (and, on one occasion, blocked my ears) during some body horror scenes like at the dentist and with the tube. I went to see this film because I want Dane Dehaan to be happy. So yes, I will probably go and see Valerian when it comes out even though it a) has Cara Delevigne, whom I find really bland and b) is directed by Luc Besson, who made Lucy and c) looks pretty lame.

And it was cool to see Swiss Francs in a movie. It was quite interesting to watch a movie set in Switzerland, albeit about how weird and incestuous Swiss people are. (We're potentially immortal?) At the end of the day, this film teaches a very important lesson: stay away from Swiss Germans. Especially rural ones. If this had taken place in the French-speaking region, I'm sure none of it would have happened.