Review: A Cure for Wellness (a film by Gore Verbinski, 2017)

The solving of a mystery... a discovery... a finding out: factors included in many great psychological thrillers (such as in a 2010's Shutter Island for example). A Cure of Wellness, though, seems to be meatier than most, not close to a "cozy mystery" at all, and particularly poetic even if its themes are Freudian in nature as well as repetitive. The story itself is adapted from the novelist Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (published in German in 1924), a book I have yet to read and which this movie has prompted me to pick up.

For contemporary audiences, Gore Verbinski's A Cure For Wellness has a lot to say (to clarify: older, more conservative audiences may not "get it"). It is saturated in a commentary of extremes, polarities, and dualisms as well as grandiose themes of illness/sickness, purity, and the Body. Furthermore, the film is loaded with symbolism. Verbinsky depicts symbolic scenes in all their gorgeous and horrific detail; each of these scenes is drawn out as if tarot card depictions pulsating with some animating force - I cannot say the animating force of life because the visual aesthetic conveyed is one that portrays the dying, the suffering, the *choking out of life*. Gorbinski's tones are vividly pale, fluorescent even in nature, buzzing with a poison and a toxicity that seems to seep in as non-color.

The first time I saw the movie I hated it. The second time I loved it. The third time I decided to write about it.

A man named Hank Green, CEO of some very large corporation, dies of a heart attack leaving unfinished business behind. The business, having to do with some big merger, now rests on the work of a man named Pembroke. Pembroke, gone for two weeks to a high-end "spa" (in actuality, a sanitarium) in Switzerland, seems to have gone mad, sending a letter to his company that reads:

There is a sickness inside us, rising like the bile that leaves that bitter taste at the back of our throats. It's there on every one of you seated around the table. We deny its existence until one day the body rebels against the mind and screams out: I am not a well man. No doubt you will think only of the merger - that unclean melding of two equally diseased institutions. But the truth cannot be ignored. For only when we know what ails us can we hope to find the cure. I will not return.

Our main character, one Mr. Lockhart, is sent to bring Pembroke back from the sanitarium to complete the merger. With this, two places are linked: that of the huge, bustling, corporate urban sprawl, and on the other hand, that of the rural, rustic, "organic", retreat of the mountains and natural landscapes of old-Europe, specifically, Switzerland. These two places might represent two extremes of setting, or place. One, always on the go, full of the excitement and movement and hustle of the business-world. The other: the settled luxury of slow movement and re-cooperation, of mental and physical therapy caught up in leisure and "health". Both worlds, though on completely opposite poles of one another, are linked by an overarching ideology that is left unsaid: the upholding of the ideology of the Patriarchy and all its subsequent machinations; discipline, loyalty, rule, power, and control.

The patriarchy of the corporate world focuses on its deadlines and notions of progress, etc. - the patriarchy of the rural focuses on its concepts of purity of the body. Both places seem to neglect the mind's health, the mind's purity, and the mind's needs and desires. As such, both are linked, it seems to me, via a corrupt idea (and indeed, production) of the phenomena called Technology (think of Martin Heidegger's concept of the techne, as part of poeisis).

Amidst all this, there is a girl, Hannah Volmer, the key to the entire filmic narrative. After spotting the girl-child atop a bridge, an incident happens that seals the characters' destiny. While driving into the small Swiss town and up the mountain to the sanitarium, Mr. Lockhart's taxi driver doesn't stop his car in time to prevent this accident: crashing into a huge buck. This scene is gruesome and beautiful, the crash unrelenting in its shock and unforeseen circumstance. The windshield is pierced hard, shatters, both car and buck in a terrible dance of death, stuck together, swerving. They split taking gravity's fall. And finally, the buck, unable to register its ultimate death, attempts to cross the road yet again, its body in shock, pulsating, failing, ribbons of wire and shattered glass clinging to it.

Mr. Lockhart wakes up at the sanitarium and discovers he must remain there until his broken leg fully heals. And from there unfolds the story.

Like an ancient folktale or an enchanted fairy-tale passed down through generations, there are explicit symbols within A Cure For Wellness that hint at a meaning that must be extrapolated from its entanglement in the sea of the passing frame by frame plot. These symbols are layered two-fold, in terms of time: the past history of the castle within which the sanitarium is constructed, and the present circumstance of the living who visit the sanitarium as spa retreat. These two elements layer, blend, and combine to weave a narrative that reproduces certain talismanic symbols: Water, eels, ballerina, lullaby, fire.

As foreshadowed by Penbroke's dark letter, everyone is sick/ill (though not all of the same ailment). Once at the sanitarium, all are (or act as) "good" patients, undergoing their treatments dutifully, but Mr. Lockhart is less benevolent and rebels, slowly discovering the "truth" of what is happening: that the director of the sanitarium is actually the head of the Volmer family, whose history permeates the entire town. The director, who has lived for centuries off of the water, is driven by a need to continue his legacy of "pure-blooded" familial breeding. This, ultimately, can be seen simply as a really sexual, lustful, and finally incestous desire to mate with his family - first, his sister centuries ago, then his daughter, at the time the story takes place (his daughter is Hannah). How the director keeps the whole place going is through the use of eels which feed off of the dead bodies of the residents and then, in turn, "purify" the water.

The passage through these worlds merges and settles itself in the relationship between Hannah and Mr. Lockhart. Lockhart is drawn to Hannah for her youth, her innocence, and for the reflection she provides to him. He notices that she really doesn't know what's going on either and is figuring it out just like him. In a brilliant full circle, when Hannah notices that Lockhart has succumbed to his experience at the sanitarium and convinces himself that it is a place he would never want to leave (similar to her sentiments when they first met), she hands him a tiny talisman: a tiny ballerina sculpture, one he gifted her days prior in exchange for leaving the premises for a little while.

The lullaby that repeats as a thematic pattern throughout the narrative is eerie and beautiful in this way connects Hannah to Lockhart's mother. The tiny ballerina originally sat atop a music box and would spin; this music box broke at the time Lockheart had the accident with the buck, the precise moment his mother dies of a heart attack, releasing the ballerina music box from her dying hand. Symbols representing innocence, childhood, naivety, and playfulness enter the mind as the patriarchal systems continue to press down and threaten their sanctity.

The film joins the long (is it?) list of other films that end in fire. A dark happily ever after opens up a possibility for escaping two polar extremes of thought (or, if I could argue, of non-thought) which long to control by use of power and rules. Hannah and Mr. Lockhart, using each other as a means to an end - not in a disrespectful or degrading way - but by a formation of true friendship, are able to untangle the knots of the rotting mystery beneath the sanitarium and push off towards a place capable of denying the corporate urban landscape its demands to achieve and eat the ambition of others similar to an ouroboros that knows no end.

I could go on. Obviously, there's much to unpack. However, I'll leave it like this. Like the film warns, one cannot unsee the truth just as one cannot be unborn. All I have to do now is let all that the movie presents dissolve and resolve... like taking another kind of medicine, the filmic kind, that continues to drip and trickle in.