A Cure for Spoilers

This week on My Bleeding Ears (Listen to us on Google Play or Sound Cloud!), I fumbled over my words a lot talked a little bit about a film I finally got around to seeing. Now, I'm going to spoil everything about the 2016 film, "A Cure for Wellness."  This movie clocks in at two hours and 27 minutes, so if you want everything spoiled for you, strap in.  My notes alone were six or seven pages long.  This is going to take forever.  So why am I wasting our time moaning about it?  Let's go. 

Some middle-aged white guy (you're not going to get a lot of diversity in this movie and I suppose it's for a reason) is looking at charts and typing on a computer in New York or something, I don't know, I don't recognize skylines.  He sees a letter on his desk sealed with a wax logo of what looks like snakes foreshadowing.  He grabs his chest, alarmed, goes to get some water, chugs it foreshadowing, grabs his chest again, dies. 

Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), is on a train in Europe somewhere on his phone and laptop, doing and saying executive things about moving money. He has also received a letter with the snake logo. The letter is narrated by the writer as a flashback begins.

"To my fellow members of the board: a man cannot unsee the truth. He cannot willingly return to darkness or go blind once he has the gift of sight, any more than he can be unborn.  We are the only species capable of self-reflection."

*Cut to a dead goldfish in a bowl in an office*

"The only species with the toxin of self-doubt written into our genetic code. Unequal to our gifts, we build, we buy, we consume."

*Lockhart approaches the bowl and takes the fish out of it*

"We wrap ourselves in the illusion of material success." 

*Throws the fish away*

"We cheat and deceive as we claw our way to the pinnacle of what we define as achievement: superiority to other men."

*Stares out a high office window* (and no, I still don't recognize the buildings, but this was released in the UK before the US, so, I probably have a decent excuse)

Lockhart meets with the board of directors. If they stated their business, I missed it, but I don't think they do, because that's not the point. You'll see. Blah blah blah financial stuff, blah blah cooking the books like an amateur, blah needs a vote from Mr. Pembroke, who has disappeared to a wellness center in the Swiss Alps. (Spoiler Inception: he wrote the letter) Lockhart vows to get him himself and bring him back to New York or wherever.  

 

Lockhart goes to an old folks' home to say goodbye to his mother, who guilts him about the home and then pulls out a toy ballerina.  She tells him a story about the ballerina.

Mom: She's asleep

Lockhart: But she's dancing.

Mom: That's because she doesn't know she's dreaming.

And scene.  OK...

A limo drives Lockhart to the wellness center in the Swiss Alps.  The limo driver tells him a story about the history of the place.  The first family to own the property lived there 200 years ago (The Von Heichmeils).  The last baron was so obsessed with the purity of his bloodline that he raped his sister a bunch of times married his sister and she got pregnant.  On their wedding night, the villagers came to the castle and burned her alive while he watched. Then they burned the whole place down. 

Lockhart arrives at the property.  I read this was actually filmed in an old facility in Germany.  The nurses are dressed in old-timey nurse dresses and hats and both these things give the setting a very 1930s feel. He asks for Pembroke and the nurse is all cagey about it.  That's gonna be a whole thing with the staff and the patients at this place. 

He leaves in the car and the car crashes.  It made me jump and it looks pretty bad. Good bit of filming. The last thing we see (from Lockhart's perspective, which is essentially how the whole film is shot) is a moose dying in the street, like, thanks a lot for that, Gore. 

Lockhart wakes up back at the center.  His leg is in a cast, so he's stuck there.

I've already seen Shutter Island and its tired-looking 32 year-old star is more near
and dear to my heart is all I'm sayin. Ok, clearly I'm also saying these movies
feel pretty similar so far.

There's so much fluid, tranquil imagery in this film, but I am really trying to pick up the pace here, so just know that you're going to see a lot of bodies of water and people floating in water.  There are pools and tubs all over the property.  Lockhart watches swimmers all coordinated and their body types are all exactly the same.

Easily in my top 10 favorite villains.  Probably top 5. 

He finds Pembroke and it's the Mayor of Sunnydale!! We found him! He acts super strange and talks about blindness and seeing some more.  Pembroke reveals to us that Lockhart's father wasn't around because when Lockhart was a child, his dad pitched off a bridge while Lockhart watched from the car.  That scene will be replayed for us a few times.  It is obviously pretty upsetting for Lockhart to remember.

Lockhart meets a girl named Hannah (Mia Goth) who's been here her whole life.  The interaction is creepy, much like this whole movie's vibe.

Dr. Volmer (Jason Isaacs) is talking to Lockhart and as he does, he takes a little blue vial and dips the dropper on his tongue calling it "vitamins." he says Pembroke took a turn for the worse and can't have visitors.  He convinces Lockhart to undergo the wellness treatment while he's stuck here, so he does.  He pees in a cup and sees another cup of pee from another patient that looks like it has teeny little penises in it foreshadowing. 

I don't know, I still think I'd get bored in there. 
Maybe not with eels, I guess. 

Now he's in a sensory deprivation chamber and sees the vision of his dad again. Soon all these eels start swirling around him so he freaks out, but the orderly can't hear him because he's busy fapping to a nurse who took her top off for him while she feeds him "vitamins."

Lockhart talks to Hannah again.  He shows her the ballerina.

Lockhart: She's dreaming and she doesn't know it.

Hannah: What will happen when she wakes up?

Lockhart: I don't know.  My mother never finished the story.

They go into town so Lockhart can ask a veterinarian about Pembroke's dental records. The vet says Pembroke is dehydrated HAHAHA. and then slits a cow from neck to genitals because his leg is broken. It's awful and all these eels come pouring out. Lockhart calls the board and finds out Pembroke's wife was infertile foreshadowing.  At a bar, Hannah dances to the jukebox, a local scumbag creeps on her, Lockhart punches him, Dr. Volmer shows up and takes them back to the property.

Lockhart dreams of Hannah in a bathtub with eels.  He wakes up to a rattling toilet handle, goes to the mirror and pulls out one of his canines.  He uses it to distract a nurse so he can see what wing Pembroke is in according to the desk roster. 

He goes there and finds a bunch of what look like iron lungs. He finds this old lady patient who mistook him for Pembroke earlier in the film and she cryptically says that Lockhart took Pembroke back to New York (I guess it was New York). 

He finds another room with patients suspended in water like prison in Demolition Man kinda.  Pembroke is among them.  (This whole time, Lockhart is really flipping his shit because of course he is.)  Volmer catches him, straps him down and drills a hole in his front tooth because he's evil, you guys, have you not been paying attention?

Lockhart goes to the police, who think he's nuts.  Volmer comes to pick him up saying, "You are not a well man."  They go back, and we find Pembroke, who says that Lockhart is trying to kidnap him.  Right around here, we notice what appears to be some Nazi memorabilia in Volmer's office, in case you were still like, "No, I bet he's a good guy."

Lockhart wakes up the next morning and pulls the lid off the rattling toilet to reveal--you guessed it--EELS!

He writes a letter to...the board?

"There is a sickness inside each of us.  We deal in lies and distraction until one day the body is one with the mind.  A man cannot unsee the truth. He cannot willingly return to darkness or go blind once given the gift of sight, any more than he can be unborn."

He cuts off his cast and his leg is fine.  More creepy imagery of weird stuff in jars and glass vials yadda yadda.

We find Hannah again.  Lockhart watches as she gets into a pool and starts to menstruate.  The eels get really excited about that so, yuck. Staff dumps a bunch of bodies into the pool. Lockhart kills one of the staff and chases Hannah into a cafeteria where he starts screaming that the water is killing them.  "There is no cure!!"  Everyone stands up slowly and we're supposed to think they finally get it, but they don't, and they grab Lockhart. 

He ends up in an iron lung next to Pembroke, who says he's never felt better.  Volmer comes in and shoves a tube in Lockhart's mouth so the eels can get in there.

"What you don't understand is that no one wants to leave.  Do you know what the cure for the human condition is?  Disease. Because only then is there hope for a cure."

Later, Hannah goes outside and finds Lockhart staring out into space. She sits next to him, takes the ballerina and says, "She's awake now." Lockhart turns to her. She says that he made her believe she could leave one day and he smiles and responds, "Why would anyone want to leave?"  She gives him the ballerina and exits.

It seems redundant to say, but this is when the movie
starts getting really weird.

A group of, I guess, nuns with lanterns walk in and surround the bridge to the property. Volmer is in robes at a shine with-- yup--water.  Hannah walks up in a wedding dress. He puts a locket around her neck. Lockhart looks at the ballerina while everyone in the great Hall dances in celebration.

Volmer unveils a bed to Hannah, ties her up, and Lockhart starts to figure it out in a, "I'm figuring it all out," montage. Volmer is the baron from the story, and Hannah is his daughter-niece, who somehow survived. 

"We tried so many times to make something pure. That something was you, but now we can begin again."

BRB, I need to take a shower. 

Oh, awesome a rape scene with nudity and digital penetration.  He smells his fingers and says he's waited so long. Lockhart comes in as Volmer pulls his damn face off and it's all Red Skull underneath.  Lockhart sets him on fire with the doll. (And gasoline.)  Volmer walks it off and there's a fight to either free or rape Hannah, respectively.  Volmer gets the upper hand, but Hannah chops his head in half with a shovel and he falls into the water. Volmer is dead and the entire facility is on fire.  Yup, this is where this whole long-ass movie was going. 

Everybody is still dancing outside in the flames as Lockhart and Hannah escape on her bike.  They get hit by a car. It's the board. They say they're looking for Pembroke. They tell him to get in the car and Lockhart refuses.

Board Guy: Have you lost your mind?

Lockhart: Actually, I'm feeling much better.

The end. 

My first thought was obviously that this movie is entirely too long. Wrap it up in two hours, I know you can do that. The themes of this movie were surely supposed to be a closer look at greed and consumerism, both on Wall Street, and in homeopathic "wellness" remedies, or even modern medicine.  They are both evil money-making schemes and we are "asleep" because we go through life "blindly" allowing it all.  Consume, consume, consume.  I know the incest theme wasn't exactly out of left field, because we heard the story early on in the movie, but I never thought that this would be the point at the end. 

Both wealth/power and purity of bloodline would fall under the same umbrella of what Pembroke's letter was getting at, "We cheat and deceive as we claw our way to the pinnacle of what we define as achievement. Superiority to other men."  It's just...I feel like Justin Haythe should have picked one and not tried to illustrate both. It makes the ending maddeningly stupid. That's why I said in our podcast that I think I liked it, but it pisses me off that I liked it. 

Also, Lockhart's Daddy Issues felt tacked on. (I get it, he "woke up," and couldn't take it, so he killed himself, and oh look at that, he killed himself with WATER.) 🙄

It is beautifully shot, and I think when we roll our eyes and groan about the the 9th over-bloated "Pirates" movie, we forget that Gore Verbinski is also behind the US remake of the Ring, which still scares the shit out of me when I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.  He's a talented guy, and I'm not saying we should forgive him for "The Lone Ranger," but we have to acknowledge his skill as a filmmaker. 

To sum up, I don't know what I expected from the trailer, but it wasn't this. To its credit, I needed time to soak it in and let it wash over me HAHAHAHAHAHAHA I'm hilarious. I'd say you should give it a watch if you have A LOT of time to kill. 

Grade: C+

A Cure for Wellness (Available on HBO)

Director: Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring, The Mexican, Mousehunt)

Writer: Justin Haythe (screenplay by), Justin Haythe (story by) (Revolutionary Road, The Lone Ranger, Red Sparrow)

Cast:

Dane DeHaan……………Lockhart (Chronicle, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Amazing Spiderman 2)

Jason Isaacs……………..Volmer (Harry Potter, The OA, Start Trek: Discovery)

Mia Goth………………….Hannah (Nymphomaniac, upcoming Suspiria remake)

Ivo Nandi………………….Enrico (Teen Wolf, Sons of Anarchy)

Adrian Schiller…………….Deputy Director (Suffragette, The Danish Girl)

Celia Imrie…………….…..Victoria Watkins (Mama Mia 2, tons of British TV)

Harry Groener…………….Pembroke (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, About Schmidt, Road to Perdition, lots of TV)

Tomas Norström……….…Frank Hill (lots of Swedish movies and TV)

Ashok Mandanna………...Ron Nair

Magnus Krepper………….Pieter the Vet

Peter Benedict..…………..Constable

Michael Mendl…………….Bartender

Maggie Steed……………..Mrs. Abramov

Craig Wroe………………..Morris

David Bishins……………..Hank Green