I think me and Gore Verbinski can never really connect fully. What I love about him and his movies is his great concepts and great sense of scale, his good at creating these incredible worlds and concepts within them that are always fascinating. Where we then disconnect are with the stories, how they are told- A Cure for Wellness had been on my radar for a while, I finally got to it and I must say, it was close to get me until it didn't. Again great world and concept but a bit lacking in the story department.
An executive is told to receive a company's CEO after he isn´t coming back from a wellness trip. After a car crash, the executive is now stuck at the wellness centre that clearly has something more going on under the surface.
This movie is absolutely stunning in terms of its visuals. It´s an incredibly well shot movie and the overall camerawork is phenomenal. So many great stills and followings with a camera really makes the movie feel so much bigger, and you capture both the hugeness of the facility and at the same time the smallness of man while looking a the huge mountains. The hot bath scene is a highlight to me really capturing the isolation the character is feeling.
Now where this movie is not holding up is it´s story. This is a mystery movie and can give some Shutter Island (2010) vibes but it never really hits the same level of mystery as that movie. The "twist" is highly predictable and actually, in my opinion, jeopardize the point of the movie a bit. The twist is not really a twist as you are given all the clues to solve the puzzle very early and the movie treats the twist like a bit revelation while it´s more or less spelled out to the audience. This also goes against the red hearing concept a lot and it´s not really playing the double role very well. The hallucinations become a bit too much in this movie if the original intent of the movie was different. It makes you question the actual nature of the movie in a bad way. All of this is also un top of a great opportunity to talk about stress and what makes sense in life, but this is quickly brushed over with the later story aspects of the movie. It wants to do a bit too many things at the same time.
This also leads to a bit too long of a runtime if you really think about what the movie wanted to tell. In that regard there is a bit too much fluff and a bit too many repetitive scenes that makes the movie just feel longer than it needs to. While it´s still engaging it just don´t pay itself off in a satisfying way.
This movie also ends on a hilarious final shot, what was that?
A Cure for Wellness has a lot of aspects I love. I love a good mystery and the movie starts out great and I love the concepts and the cinematography, but the story is just not strong enough to carry the movie. I would love to see this movie remade, with a bit more emphasis on the abandoned red hearing aspects as they are no doubt the more interesting aspects of the movie.
An executive is told to receive a company's CEO after he isn´t coming back from a wellness trip. After a car crash, the executive is now stuck at the wellness centre that clearly has something more going on under the surface.
This movie is absolutely stunning in terms of its visuals. It´s an incredibly well shot movie and the overall camerawork is phenomenal. So many great stills and followings with a camera really makes the movie feel so much bigger, and you capture both the hugeness of the facility and at the same time the smallness of man while looking a the huge mountains. The hot bath scene is a highlight to me really capturing the isolation the character is feeling.
Now where this movie is not holding up is it´s story. This is a mystery movie and can give some Shutter Island (2010) vibes but it never really hits the same level of mystery as that movie. The "twist" is highly predictable and actually, in my opinion, jeopardize the point of the movie a bit. The twist is not really a twist as you are given all the clues to solve the puzzle very early and the movie treats the twist like a bit revelation while it´s more or less spelled out to the audience. This also goes against the red hearing concept a lot and it´s not really playing the double role very well. The hallucinations become a bit too much in this movie if the original intent of the movie was different. It makes you question the actual nature of the movie in a bad way. All of this is also un top of a great opportunity to talk about stress and what makes sense in life, but this is quickly brushed over with the later story aspects of the movie. It wants to do a bit too many things at the same time.
This also leads to a bit too long of a runtime if you really think about what the movie wanted to tell. In that regard there is a bit too much fluff and a bit too many repetitive scenes that makes the movie just feel longer than it needs to. While it´s still engaging it just don´t pay itself off in a satisfying way.
This movie also ends on a hilarious final shot, what was that?
A Cure for Wellness has a lot of aspects I love. I love a good mystery and the movie starts out great and I love the concepts and the cinematography, but the story is just not strong enough to carry the movie. I would love to see this movie remade, with a bit more emphasis on the abandoned red hearing aspects as they are no doubt the more interesting aspects of the movie.
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