Factual error: The license plate of the car that takes the protagonist to the sanitarium is GR 36E46. That's not a valid Swiss plate: GR indicates the canton of Graubünden, but other than that it is supposed to have only digits and no letters.
A Cure for Wellness (2016)
1 review
Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Jason Isaacs, Dane DeHaan, Mia Goth, Ivo Nandi
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Usually movies accused of being all style over substance tend to make their plot fairly impalpable or convoluted, and not resolve their main story, provided they have one. A Cure for Wellness instead handles its plot with all the subtlety (or lack thereof) of pure schlock horror, with a twist you can see coming from the very moment certain characters are introduced, and the obligatory ominous story is told. Yet the movie is not content with that, and culminates with a grandiose crescendo that would normally be treated as the cathartic ending of a vintage horror. And yet, said ending comes across as the most deeply unsatisfying part of the experience.
My personal answer as to why, lies exactly in how this type of ending wraps the 'wrong' part of the plot, the one that the audience could (and did for sure) figure out literally hours before the movie does so (the movie runs really long). The protagonist has done nothing but walk through exposition throughout the movie: all the diversions and creative spooky situations the movie presented earlier, where Verbinski's masterful cinematography shone, are the ones left unresolved. I am sure you can nitpick as 'hallucinations' and 'eel induced visions' every single unexplained event and connection in the movie, but combining exposition (of already phoned-in plot points) with mystery and artsy does not produce a compelling result. It's even more frustrating when you consider the brilliance of subtle symbolism through sheer visuals, the kind of hint that does not call for any explaining.
Instead, every close relation with the protagonist and his past and his personal life and evolution as character get dropped about halfway through, leaving us just with a wonderfully shot gothic horror with a Z-grade script. Shame! Give this movie 5 stars if you are just going to analyze it shot-by-shot, or add 1 star if you stop watching at the bench scene. It would have been a better ending, and you'd have gotten all the relevant plot elements anyway.
More mistakes in A Cure for Wellness
Volmer: Most of my patients have done extraordinary things. Built vast fortunes, commanded great empires... but at a terrible cost. They have no-one who cares from them.
Trivia: When Lockhart is in the sensory deprivation tank, the nurse that does a poor job of keeping an eye on him is reading "Der Zauberberg" by Thomas Mann, which obviously has at that point a common premise with the movie (the main character goes to a sanatorium in the Alps just as a visitor but ends up as an inmate). The novel was inspired by Mann's visit to his wife at a Swiss sanatorium which happened in 1912, same year as the picture fully unveiled in the finale.
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Answer: As a result of the tortures he endured at the hospital, Lockhart lost his mind. At the end, as he pedals away from the hospital and down the road, he grins maniacally because he is now quite mad.
Charles Austin Miller