31 Days, 31 Screams Resurrection- Day 21 (A Cure For Wellness)

"The systems aren't the problem."

Here we go again, from one sanitarium to another. I don't know how the shape of this one is going to go. Could be long, could be short. A Cure For Wellness is a very strange film, quite hefty at 150 minutes or so. Its message is also pretty clear-cut. This is an anticapitalist film... or at least, as anticapitalist as a studio-released movie can be. It somehow manages to convey this, mostly by using a direct mirroring structure and coating what's being mirrored in a whole bunch of gonzo metaphor about health spas and exploitation. The opening, though, is dealing with straight-up capitalism. A totally unrelated man working late but groaning about chest pains who collapses, spilling a bunch of water. Yeah water's a big thing in this movie, get used to that. So that leads our protagonist Lockhart, a hypercapitalist himself, to be sent to retrieve another hypercapitalist from a health spa in Switzerland so he can be brought back to secure a big merger and also take the fall for Lockhart's illegal fudging of the numbers or whatever. Because, you know. Capitalism. Getting all the gain for yourself while some other poor schmuck suffers the consequences. Get used to that too because it's the core of the film.


Let's rip the band-aid off and get right down to it, huh? That's the point of the whole thing, as I said. The exploitation of people deemed lesser, all so a small minority reap the benefits in perpituity. There's a lot of slow build psychological horror going on in this movie, to its credit, but I'm happy to say I pegged the anticap reading pretty early on and it helped me guess a few of the late-game twists. It's got plenty of time to build to its setpieces, and maybe it's too leisurely in spots but it works. On the outside, then, we have a health spa where rich people come to relieve themselves of the stresses of the world. Inside? It's all a front for a bunch of immortals. The head doctor, his staff, and a very special patient all get to harness the water of life and use it to live forever, all while they slowly poison the people who are here to be healed and drain the life force from them, leaving withered husks who are then fed to the eel creatures which are poisoning them to purify the water of life for the priveleged. These people are the 1%, hoarding immortality and murdering countless old people in the process all so they get to live longer. All while lying through their teeth about it to the bitter end. They know goddamned well what they're doing, and they keep doing it. That's mostly the staff. Dr. Volmer, the one in charge... well, he's up to way more.


It's actually quite disturbing, Volmer's grand plan. See, 200 years before all of this, a baron lived in the castle setting of the film. He got burned at the stake along with his sister, because he wanted to marry his sister. Which, yuck, but their child survived and is actually the special patient at his spa, Hannah. And he like... wants her. That's what all this murder and lifeforce draining is for; not just to keep them alive, but so he can keep their bloodline alive. You know. I can't even type it out in full, it's just that goddamned gross. I'm used to bullshit power structures sacrificing innocents so those in control can do it all to save one person close to them, because I play Japanese RPGs, but this is a level of fucked up beyond that. What does Lockhart do when he finds out? He lights the shit on fire. Lockhart's 150 minutes of hell have turned him anticap, and he ends the movie riding off with Hannah on her bike instead of going back with his bosses. As he says, he's feeling much better. So really, when you think about it, capitalism was the "wellness" of the movie. Systems put in place to benefit some at the expense of others, be it becoming rich or living forever. Lockhart's cured at the end. What a wild movie. Shame about the gross shit in it.