A Cure For Wellness *SPOILERS*

Some of my friends will hate this review (if anyone reads it) because they are strict spoiler-phobes. But I don't really care. My emotions about this are directly related to the ending, so I'm going to lay it all out.

When I saw the trailers for this I was so excited for multiple reasons. I liked the weird feel of the trailer. I don't mind weird, although there are limits. And I love Jason Isaacs. He is really making a name for himself as a creepy villain, and I couldn't be happier. This one though....

It starts out so visually stunning. There's a shot of a train going into a tunnel (hmmm) where the surroundings are reflected onto the sides of the train. It's beautiful. The settings are stunning and the lighting brought tears to my eyes at times. This is what I expected, so I was a happy little moviegoer.

The plot is that the CEO of a company (Pembroke) has gone off to a Swiss health spa and basically told the board he's not coming back. Rising star Lockhart is called before the board and instructed to go get him back so that an important merger can go through. Faced with his own shady dealings, Pembroke heads out. On the way he's told the story of the castle that makes up part of the property.

The baron who once lived there was obsessed with the purity of his bloodline (shades of Voldemort?) so he decides to marry his own sister. Originally we're told that they couldn't conceive and when the villagers found out what was going on, they burned the place to the ground. But just wait.

Lockhart is denied a visit to see Pembroke because he arrives after visiting hours. He's told to come back the next day. On the way back to town, his car hits a deer and flies off the road. This is a really disturbing scene, and if you can't make it past this, you should just turn it off now.

Lockhart wakes up 3 days later with a broken leg. The director of the retreat, Dr. Vollmer, tells Lockhart he's informed his company that he needs time to recover. Their acquiescence raises a red flag for Lockhart, but what can he do. It gets very Shutter Island from here. He makes his way through the spa, interacting with the Stepford-Wives-esque patients and staff. At one point, he enters a steam room reminiscent of the old Atari Adventure game. Eventually he convinces Pembroke to come back, but the next day, he's unable to find him.

They convince him to undergo treatment in a deprivation tank the size of a water tower. It's ridiculously, unnecessarily huge. There he's attacked by the creepy eels that inhabit the aquifer that everyone drinks out of. Those eels. Yeah, they represent what you think they represent.

On the grounds, he finds a young girl named Hannah. She's the youngest person at the spa, what Vollmer calls a "special case". She's there waiting to get better so her father can come for her. He's never visited her, she's just waiting to get better for him.

Lockhart eventually discovers a different story to the original one about the castle and its previous inhabitants. Same beginning but the villagers burned the baron's wife at the stake after cutting her fetus from her body, then threw it in the aquifer before burning the castle down.

Prepare for the spoilers.

Dr. Vollmer has been using his patients as a filter for some sort of eel-infused vitamin potion that he, Hannah, and a few choice people have been taking throughout the film, draining and dehydrating them in the process. They then feed the desiccated corpses back to the eels in an underground aquifer/Frankenstein's laboratory. This has kept them alive for years, and we learn that Dr. Vollmer is the baron, Hannah is his daughter, and he's been waiting for her to get her first period so he can marry her.

Yep.

Now I wrote awhile back about Passengers and the abuse subplot many people saw running through it, which I totally disagree with. Here, Vollmer ties his daughter to a bed, rips her bodice open, shoves his hand between her legs, then savors the smell. This is no minor interpretation of a plot point, this is a major piece of abuse. Yet there's not one mention of it; I looked. Of the few reviews I found, only one was from a woman, who essentially praised its weirdness and beauty.

I find the silence strange. Is it that this isn't as high profile a film, so the abuse is tolerable? Is it because the victim takes out her abuser so it makes the representation ok? Like that freaky sensory deprivation tank, it's just unnecessary. Like this entire film, it goes way too far for way too long.

Now I'm faced with a dilemma. A film this beautifully shot deserves praise to an extent. I wanted to write this and list all the reasons why everyone was overlooking a masterpiece and that the Academy should look at this film for a cinematography award. But at a time when sexual abuse of women seems to unfortunately be edging toward the acceptable, any representation in film should be handled carefully. It's disappointing that one of my favorite actors was involved and that a film that could have been so much more and would have deserved so much praise was so reckless. Is it ok if it's an arthouse film as opposed to a blockbuster with all A-list actors? I'm not sure where the lines are drawn. And I'm not sure if I'm making too much of this.

Maybe if anyone reads this, you'll let me know.