The trailer for A Cure For Wellness thankfully gives very little away about the plot and serves only to entice with a contextless tour of its setting, evocative of a world almost straight out of a Sarah Kane play. The hopeless and dark atmosphere could leave the viewer with an unsavoury feeling but this is balanced out by the gorgeous cinematography and craftsmanship.
The film takes place in a stark, idyllic ‘wellness centre’ which sits atop a mountain in a remote part of the Swiss Alps. It is an orderly and well funded institute clad with doctors in clean white lab coats overseeing questionable ‘treatments’. Dane DeHaan plays a young executive who is sent to meet with the company’s CEO, but when he begins to suspect that the spa’s miraculous treatments are not what they seem, his own sanity is tested. Having directed films with oddly varying genres – from the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, to horror classic The Ring (2002) – Gore Verbinski‘s latest, a psychological thriller, is a step in a new direction again and a unique and artful take on the genre. The film co-stars Mia Goth, Jason Isaacs and Celia Imrie.
The trailer is accompanied by some unusual marketing tactics, including a commercial for the ‘wellness centre’ itself, which presents the film as a critique of modern medicine and the contemporary capitalist lifestyle it thrives within. Rated R for disturbing violence, sexual content, graphic nudity, and language, A Cure For Wellness is set to be released in the US in February and the UK in March. You can watch the trailer and the commercial for the ‘centre’ below.
Dane DeHaan in A Cure For Wellness
Mia Goth in A Cure For Wellness
And the commercial for the ‘wellness centre’:
