A Cure for Wellness

Year of Release:  2016

Director:  Gore Verbinski

Screenplay:  Justin Haythe, from a story by Gore Verbinski and Justin Haythe

Starring:  Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth

Running Time:  146 minutes

Genre:  Horror, drama

Lockhart (DeHaan), an ambitious young executive at a New York financial services institution, is assigned to retrieve the company's CEO from a remote "wellness centre" somewhere in the Swiss Alps.  When Lockhart arrives he soon discovers that the centre's grotesque treatments hide a disturbing secret.

Loosely inspired by the Thomas Mann novel The Magic Mountain, this is an impressively mounted, handsome film, stylishly made, with an intriguing mystery.  There are also some impressive performances such as Jason Isaacs as the sinister head of the institution and Mia Goth as the strange, otherworldly girl who lives in the institute.  However the film is overly long with a running time of almost two and half hours, and there are some gaping plot holes.  Also the lead character, as played by Dane DeHaan, is so obnoxious it's really hard to care what happens to him.  It starts out as an elegant "elevated horror" film (basically horror for people who look down on horror films), but moves into full on gothic horror by the end.  Despite the sedate pace, the film boasts some genuinely horrific moments of body horror, including a genuinely nightmarish dental scene.  There are very obvious parallels to Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010), and Phantom of the Opera and even to bizarre sixties TV series The Prisoner (1967-1968).  It won't be too everyone's tastes, but if you have the patience and stomach for it, it is intriguing and beautiful enough not to feel like a waste of time.

    Dane DeHaan in A Cure for Wellness

Event Horizon

 Year of Release:  1997

Director:  Paul W. S. Anderson

Screenplay:  Philip Eisner

Starring:  Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Sean Pertwee, Jason Isaacs, Richard T. Jones, Jack Noseworthy

Running Time:  92 minutes

Genre:  Science-fiction, horror

In the year 2047, the rescue vessel Lois and Clark is on a mission to retrieve the experimental spacecraft Event Horizon which vanished on it's maiden voyage seven years previously and has suddenly reappeared above Neptune.  Upon investigation it turns out that the Event Horizon is intact, but the crew have been brutally massacred.  It soon becomes apparent that the Event Horizon's revolutionary new gravity drive which allows the ship to travel vast distances by using a sort of artificial black hole to bridge two points in space.  However, the ship has travelled further than was ever planned and has brought something back with it.

This gruesome blend of science-fiction with supernatural horror is an enjoyable slice of "B"-grade hokum.  very heavily influenced by Alien (1979), The Shining (1980) and Hellraiser (1987), as well as Don't Look Now (1973) and Solaris (1972).  The plentiful special effects haven't aged well, the storyline is very derivative and the dialogue is pretty cheesy, however it does have some impressive production design and strong performances from a solid cast.  The film had a difficult production history, was heavily cut by it's studio, and was a critical and commercial flop when it was first released in August 1997, however it has had something of a reappraisal since and is now a major cult film.  It's a consistently entertaining film, which moves quickly and never gets dull.  For some gory late night escapism, this really does the job.  

     Event Horizon