A puzzling gothic fantasy, horror with social satire at heart, with a bit of Pirates of the Caribbean action sprinkled on top.
Our protagonist is a kind of managing director at an I Bank, responsible for a lot of money. He lives only for one thing - making more money. At the top of a castle in the Swiss Alps, he realizes his true place in the world.
The meaning is fundamentally this. There's an elite group of people at the very top, lording over everyone, milking everyone of their water - which is metaphorically a kind of life essence, represented by their "bodily fluids" and money.
Nobody ever leaves alive, because that metaphor is life.
The movie gives us a happy ending, but it feels like a fairy tale. I feel that most of the audience got out without realizing this meaning, choosing perhaps to focus on the fairy tale/horror/mystery parts.
The Good
- The main symbolism is water. The symbolism is marvellous. The shots are slow and smooth. It doesn't rely on sudden appearances to scare one. It knows that the audience will eventually scare themselves.
Water is money, water is life, water is rebirth, water is time. This movie plays on great themes.
- The movie is well-casted.
The protagonist. DeHaan has just the right look to play the main character, Lockhart, a corrupt young East Coast WASP who travels to Switzerland to find a missing company executive but ends up trapped at a “wellness clinic” run by a German-accented doctor named Heinrich Volmer (Jason Issacs).
And of course, you just can't go wrong with the actor who played Malfoy in the Harry Potter series. He's got the right mix of masculine charm (tall rectangular face, clear jaw angles) and smooth persuasiveness that keeps the audience trying to figure out what's really wrong with the place.
The doctor's daughter is played by Mia Goth (of Nymphomaniac Vol 2 fame), who's perfectly suited to play the strange light-footed, anaemic, naive girl who doesn't age.
The nurses and orderlies have a stone-cold expression that balances professionalism and evil minion.
- The dull color tone is perfectly suited to the dark mood of the movie. Whether it's the dark looming skyscrapers that stick to the top or the indoor lighting in the castle. There is no missing what the movie wants to say about the
- The references to other films.
I can't help but notice the similarities to The Shining. The winding path to the castle, the hauntingly spirit-like girl in the blue dress, the confusing maze in the sauna, the hallucination
- The tempo.
The film takes great delight in peeling back the evil to its core. 146 minutes is a lot of time.
The Bad
There's nothing really bad about this movie. I thought the movie was fine but the audience may not be mature or understanding enough. I thought the reviews are rather cruel with it. I think the mix of comedic action and brief sequences of psychological horror is funny. There's some rewatch value in this movie.
Remarkable Quotes
Volmer: Do you know what the cure for the human condition is? Disease. Because that's the only way one could hope for a cure.
