Author: Stefan Pape

To live for the weekend is a lifestyle and routine so many get unwittingly caught up in, and while Gore Verbinski’s latest endeavour A Cure For Wellness thrives in its supernaturalism, it’s grounded, persistently, by its commitment to the sheer mundanity of every day life, and it’s what makes this such an absorbing, contemporary horror.

Dane DeHaan plays Lockhart, an ambitious executive striving to get to the very top, by any means necessary, and when caught up in fraudulent activity, he can escape punishment by thrusting the company’s CEO into the limelight, and so is sent on a brief vacation to the Swiss Alps, to retrieve his boss from an elusive, idyllic wellness centre, run by the shady doctor Volmer (Jason Isaacs). The spa retreat specialises in treatment by water, though as Lockhart discovers, the methods are far from pure, and though initially anticipating a brief,...