“There is a sickness inside us, rising like that bile that leaves a bitter taste at the back of our throats.” Ever since Jason Isaac’s dreary monologue introduced the first trailer for Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness, there’s been a very particular air of mystery surrounding the director’s return to psychological horror.
Of course, much of that ambiguity can be attributed to the film’s suitably creepy marketing campaign – the haunting promos, the overt nods to modern-day narcissism – but it is Jason Isaac’s manic, aristocratic director that will anchor Verbinski’s thriller in a few weeks’ time.
Presiding over a European “wellness center,” Isaac plays Volmer, a prickly intelligent scientist who subjects his human guests to a wide range of gnarly experiments, each more horrifying than the last. Mr. Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) is the latest resident to express interest in A Cure for Wellness, and up above you’ll get a fleeting glimpse at the horrors that await deep within the otherwise idyllic Swiss Alps.
Also starring Nymphomaniac‘s Mia Goth, many consider A Cure for Wellness to be a welcome return to form for Gore Verbinski, who dreamed up the unsettling thriller soon after the fallout from Disney bomb The Lone Ranger. For a director that got his big break helming the American remake of The Ring all those years, it’s small wonder why Verbinski’s latest has garnered so much buzz.
Gore Verbinski’s process of purification will be packaged and shipped to theaters when A Cure for Wellness opens on February 17th.
An ambitious young executive is sent to retrieve his company’s CEO from an idyllic but mysterious “wellness center” at a remote location in the Swiss Alps. He soon suspects that the spa’s miraculous treatments are not what they seem. When he begins to unravel its terrifying secrets, his sanity is tested, as he finds himself diagnosed with the same curious illness that keeps all the guests here longing for the cure. From Gore Verbinski, the visionary director of The Ring, comes the new psychological thriller, A Cure for Wellness.