- yesterday
A woman story
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00Welcome back to Movie Recapped. Today I will show you a drama, fantasy, horror film from 2016,
00:05titled A Cure for Wellness. Spoilers ahead. Watch out and take care.
00:10We find our protagonist, Lockhart, working on his laptop on a train in Europe. He has a letter with
00:15him that he picks up to review its contents. The letter comes from his company's CEO Roland
00:19Pembroke and is informing the board of directors that he won't be coming back because he's found
00:23the truth and the cure. While Lockhart re-reads the letter, he starts remembering how all this
00:27started. A couple of days ago, in his New York office, a recently promoted Lockhart is summoned
00:32by the board of directors. Once in their office, they show him this letter, which makes everyone
00:37think Pembroke has lost his mind during his holiday. The board is worried about the incoming merge,
00:42needing Pembroke for legal matters, so they send Lockhart to retrieve him from that sanatorium,
00:46a mission he can't refuse because he's threatened with jail thanks to some irregularities found on
00:50his business transactions. Back in the present, Lockhart's train makes it to its destination,
00:54a station near the Swiss Alps. He's picked up by a driver that works for the sanatorium and points
00:59out Lockhart is younger than the usual clients, they're usually elderly and rich, and they never
01:03want to leave. When the driver asks Lockhart about his family, we get another flashback,
01:08before getting his promotion, Lockhart visited his mother at the retirement home, where she was
01:12painting ballerina dolls, and she gifted him one. That ballerina is with him in the present,
01:17still in the car. They pass through the local village, where they aren't well-received,
01:21the locals have never liked the people from the mountain. The driver tells him some history of
01:25the place then, the foundations date back to the time of barons, these lands have always belonged
01:29to the von Reichmerl family. The last baron was so obsessed with the purity of his lineads that he
01:34decided only his sister was good enough to carry his child. When the church protested, he renounced
01:39God and on the wedding night, the villagers went up to the castle, dragged the couple to the catacombs
01:43and made the baron watch how they burned his sister alive. They burned the whole place afterward,
01:47this was 200 years ago. They make it to the residence soon after. As soon as he gets inside,
01:53Lockhart asks the receptionist to see Pembroke, but she points out that visiting hours are over.
01:58Since she won't make an exception for him, he asks to see the manager before going outside to make a
02:02phone call while waiting. A trio of elderly patients that include Victoria Watkins points out there's no
02:07signal up there as part of the treatment, but Lockhart keeps trying anyway. Another old man asks him to
02:12pass him the ball he just threw and when Lockhart crouches to grab it, he hears some weird noises coming
02:16from a small building in the middle of the garden. Moments later, he's received by one of the doctors
02:20in his office. While the doctor drinks some drops from a little blue bottle that he claims are
02:25vitamins, Lockhart asks for an exception to be able to see Pembroke again. The doctor also turns him
02:29down as he explains it's part of the treatment and tells Lockhart a little about it, the sanatorium is
02:34built on top of an ancient aquifer with unique rejuvenating properties. Since Lockhart keeps insisting
02:39on the importance of his visit, the doctor tells him to come after 7, when the treatments are over.
02:43Lockhart drinks a glass of water before leaving. The driver is waiting for him outside. As he enters
02:49the car, Lockhart asks him to take him to a hotel so he can make a call. On their way out, they see a
02:55mysterious girl standing on one of the walls of the building. They've barely made it to the road
02:59when a moose comes out of nowhere and hits the car, making it roll off the road and knocking out
03:03Lockhart and the driver. We go through a series of visions then, including a fire, the girl from the
03:08wall, the ballerina dolls, eels, blue bottles, and Lockhart's mother passing away alone in the
03:12retirement home. Sometime later, Lockhart wakes up in a bed at the sanitarium where he finally meets
03:18the doctor in charge, Heinrich Vohm. After he tells Lockhart he's been there for three days,
03:23Lockhart takes the sheets off him only to find his leg in a cast. Vollmer tells him he's already called
03:28Lockhart's bosses to tell them about the accident, and they said Lockhart's health is more important,
03:32which sounds very unlike them. He also tells him that since they're on high altitudes,
03:36he should drink plenty of water. Now Lockhart is stuck there until he recovers. When he drinks
03:41his glass of water, he can't help noticing a tiny worm-like creature in it. Lockhart leaves his room
03:46and explores the sanitarium in search of Pembroke, he learns he's in the sauna after lying to a nurse
03:50to get the information. When he gets to the sauna, Lockhart feels a bit at loss, there seems to be room
03:55after room connected to each other, and at some point, he can't even find a door, thinking he's
04:00trapped. A noise suddenly alerts him of a door reappearing and when he turns around,
04:04he sees a moose passing by. When he enters that room, he finally finds Pembroke. Lockhart tries to
04:10convince him to return to New York, but Pembroke refuses, saying he's not well, even if he doesn't
04:14look like it. While Lockhart continues to talk business, Pembroke changes rooms to get into a
04:19swimming pool. After being underwater for a moment, he resurfaces and accepts to go back to work for a
04:24few days. Hours later, Lockhart approaches the receptionist and tells her to call for a car that
04:28will take him to the station. He leaves for the gardens afterward, and he can't help staring at the
04:33small garden building. Victoria notices this and approaches him to tell him about the history of
04:37the place by showing him a book, that's the former church where the baron hang the priest. Lockhart
04:41tells her about the incest situation, which she didn't know about. After she leaves for her treatment,
04:46Lockhart starts hearing a female voice singing and decides to follow the sound.
04:50Near a well behind the building, he finds the girl he saw on the wall the day he arrived.
04:55When he asks her if there's something in the water, she says there is, but he doesn't see anything.
04:59The girl explains she is a patient here, much younger than average because she's a special
05:03case. When he says he isn't a patient and he was just leaving, she mentions nobody ever leaves.
05:08After she notices she's being watched from a window, the girl leaves, but not without introducing
05:13herself, her name is Hannah. Lockhart returns to the sanitarium, but there's nobody at the reception
05:18desk and Pembroke isn't in his room either. He goes to the dining room next, where doctors and
05:23patients alike are having diner, to confront Vollmer. Apparently, Pembroke relapsed so he can't leave,
05:28but Lockhart doesn't buy it, he thinks the doctors are keeping the patients sick for the sake of the
05:32business. He starts to threaten with legal action when suddenly his nose starts bleeding and his
05:36mind gets dizzy before he passes out. He wakes up in Vollmer's office, who is giving him an
05:41examination. After that's done, Lockhart notices a picture of Hannah on the doctor's desk,
05:46Vollmer tells him she's a special case because she went through severe trauma as a child and she has
05:50development problems, she didn't speak until she was 11, and that she's like a daughter to him.
05:54He changes the subject then and tells Lockhart he ran some tests after the accident, the results
05:59aren't good, he thinks Lockhart is a very advanced case for such a young age. So he offers him to go
06:04through the purification treatment while waiting for Pembroke to get better, Lockhart accepts to
06:08play along. When Vollmer leaves the office to find a nurse, Lockhart opens a cabinet and steals
06:13Pembroke's file, he also finds another of those blue bottles. When the doctor returns, Lockhart distracts
06:18him by asking about a locket that was hanging nearby as he hides the stolen files in his clothes.
06:22Vollmer tells him the locket was found during the rebuilding and used to belong to the Baroness,
06:27a very sick woman. It was the Baron that found out about the healing properties of the water when
06:31trying to find a cure for her. A nurse comes to pick him up to take him to the isolation chamber
06:35then. Before the treatment, Lockhart must urinate in a cup and when he leaves it next to other samples,
06:40he notices the other patient's cups have something weird floating in them. He's put in a huge metal
06:45chamber afterward, which is filled with water. He's told not to be surprised if he has some visions,
06:49which is a common side effect, and that he should knock on the chamber window if he needs anything.
06:54The visions start pretty quickly, first he sees some memories of his father, but then he sees
06:58Hannah, which makes him open his eyes and notice the eels that are now with him in the tank.
07:02Panicking, Lockhart knocks on the window to no avail, since the doctor is busy being intimate with a
07:06nurse and sharing more vitamin drops. Lockhart tries to swim up and open the chamber door,
07:11but it's sealed, so he ends up passing out. After remembering the day his father jumped off a bridge,
07:16Lockhart wakes up and finds himself on the bridge next to the chamber, the doctor and the nurse next
07:20to him. He tells him there's something in the water, but when they look at it with the torch,
07:24there's nothing there. Back in his room, he retrieves Pembrose's file from his hidden spot in
07:29his cast. Lockhart doesn't understand the words, but he does find some x-rays that tellin Pembrose was
07:34losing his teeth. His reading is interrupted by a sound coming from the bathroom so he goes to
07:39investigate, the toilet lever is shaking. Touching it is enough to stop it, and now he's near the window,
07:44Lockhart notices something strange, a bald man is taking a body on a stretcher into the church
07:48building. The next morning, Lockhart goes to ask Victoria what the church building is being used
07:53for nowadays. She says she doesn't know, but she's found out something else, the villagers didn't burn
07:58the sanitarium down because of the siblings' marriage, they did it because of the experiments.
08:03Peasants had been disappearing and in 1814, farmers found their disfigured bodies, similar to
08:08mummies. Before leaving for her treatment, she tells Lockhart that there's a terrible darkness in this
08:12place. Lockhart goes to the church building to try to get in, but it's locked. He sees the bald man
08:18from last night and asks him about it, but he doesn't speak English. It's then that he sees Hannah
08:22passing by on a bike in the distance, so he follows her. When he catches up with her, he offers his
08:27ballerina doll in exchange for Hannah giving him a ride to town. She accepts even if she isn't allowed
08:32to. Once in town, they enter a bar where they get many weird looks. Lockhart asks for two pints of
08:38beers and the closest thing to a doctor, he's told to go see Peter. He takes the beer to a table to
08:43share with Hannah and she tells her more about her life, she's been in the clinic for as long as she
08:46remembers, her mother passed away when she was a baby, and her father is supposed to come when she
08:50feels better. She's also drinking the blue bottle vitamins, which she shares with him. Lockhart tells
08:56her to wait for him for a moment while he goes to see Peter, who is a vet but will still read
09:00Pembrose's files in exchange for money. He informs Lockhart that the people from the spa are dying from
09:05dehydration, which makes no sense considering all the water they drink. Lockhart suspects their
09:09experiments like the baron used to do, and Peter tells him the baroness wasn't sick, she was infertile.
09:15After that he goes back to work, he needs to put a cow that drank black water out of her misery.
09:19When he cuts her stomach open, a calf and a bunch of eels come out. Meanwhile, at the bar, one of the
09:24locals lends Hannah a coin so she can choose a song at the jukebox, which she starts dancing to.
09:29Lockhart returns then and asks the barman for a phone to call New York. When his boss picks up he's
09:34very angry, turns out nobody actually called the company to tell them about the accident.
09:38Lockhart drops the phone when he notices a guy getting too close to Hannah and he tries to get
09:42her away to interrogate her about the vitamins, making the other guy angry. They get into a fight,
09:47and Lockhart is threatened with a knife when Vollmer makes his appearance at the bar,
09:50making everyone back way since they're afraid of him. After scolding Lockhart for taking Hannah to town,
09:55both of them are taken back to the clinic. After seeing a vision of Hannah in a tub full of eels,
10:00Lockhart wakes up in his room and once again, sees the bald man with a stretcher near
10:04the church building. The bathroom noises happen again too and when he goes there to stop them,
10:08he looks at himself in the mirror to notice a tooth getting loose, so he easily pulls it out.
10:13Lockhart runs to see a nurse, and he gives her his tooth to put in milk. While she's doing that,
10:18he checks the treatment list to find Pembro's and leaves before the nurse returns.
10:22It takes him a lot of walking into the deepest areas of the sanitarium and avoiding many doctors to
10:26find the transfusion wing. There are some weird metal chambers, hot to the touch, that confirm some weird
10:31experiments are going on. On a stretcher nearby, she finds Victoria, who adds more bits to the story,
10:36the baroness was pregnant the night of the wedding, and the fetus was cut out before they burned her.
10:41The baby was thrown in the aquifer and survived, but she doesn't know it. When stepping back from
10:45Virginia's creepy touch, Lockhart pushes some trays to the floor and must leave the room before
10:49the noises alerted the doctors. He makes it to another room and when he turns on the lights,
10:53he finds a terrifying sight, many bodies floating in water, including Pembro's. Scared, he runs away,
10:59and Vollmer finds him, he pretends to have gotten lost while trying to find someone to check his
11:03tooth. They take him to see the clinic's dentist, where he's tied to a chair because they don't use
11:07anesthetics. The dentist is in the process of drilling one of Lockhart's good teeth when we
11:12cut the sanitarium's entrance, where a new patient is arriving in the usual car. The driver is about
11:17to take off when suddenly, a bleeding Lockhart enters the back seat and asks him to get him out of
11:21there. When they reach town, Lockhart goes to see a police officer and tells him everything that's
11:25happened. The cop is skeptical, and asks him for a way to check his identity, Lockhart gives him his
11:31company's phone number because he doesn't have his wallet with him. The officer leaves to make the
11:34call and Lockhart notices a blue bottle on the shelves. He doesn't have time to react because
11:39when the cop returns, Vollmer is with him and says Lockhart has been hallucinating. To prove it,
11:44he makes Pembro's come in, who says Lockhart was going to take him way away against his will.
11:48Lockhart is taken back to the sanitarium, where he's going through all the treatments.
11:51He starts writing a letter very similar to the one Pembro's had written, and when he reaches the
11:56part of finding out the truth, he has a realization. He grabs the glass from his desk and breaks it,
12:01and with a shard, he cuts his cast open, turns out his leg had been fine the whole time.
12:06Determined to get to the bottom of this, Lockhart leaves for the church building,
12:09which he forces open with a shovel. Inside he finds a huge laboratory with eel drawings,
12:14baby fetuses in jars and faces floating on dishes. There's also a portrait of the Baroness surrounded by
12:19candles. He moves deeper into the cave and finds the bald man throwing bodies into the river for
12:23the eels to eat. At the same time in the main building, Hannah gets into a swimming pool and
12:28is also approached by eels, who at first swim closer but suddenly form a circle around her as
12:32she starts bleeding between her legs. Back in the cave, the bald man notices Lockhart and attacks
12:37him, but after some struggling, Lockhart manages to shake him off and ends him with a hit to the head.
12:42Both Hannah and Lockhart run away from their locations and meet in the clinic hallways,
12:46but Hannah pushes him away to go find Vollmer in the dining room. Lockhart follows her inside and
12:51starts telling everyone that the doctor is making them sick on purpose so they should stand up against
12:55him. The patients start doing so, but they're in a zombie-like state, so they surround Lockhart and
12:59capture him. Later on, Lockhart's taken to the transfusion wing. While Vollmer connects puts him
13:05in one of the special chambers, he explains how the experiments work, the water from the aquifer is
13:09toxic to humans, but with life-restoring properties for the eels. The Baron discovered how to distill the
13:14water to create an elixir apt for humans and they use patients for it. They're put in the chambers,
13:19forced eels down their throats, and the filtered water leaves their bodies into those little blue
13:22bottles. Vollmer puts Lockhart through that exact procedure before leaving. The next day, Hannah is
13:28told by Vollmer that she's a woman now and she's ready. Before joining the doctor for the next step,
13:33she visits Lockhart, who looks completely brainwashed and says he doesn't want to leave.
13:37Hannah gifts him back the doll before leaving to get ready. Later at night, Vollmer together with
13:42doctors and nurses all dress up rather fancily for a special occasion, Vollmer gets married to Hannah,
13:47putting the Baroness Lockhart around her neck during the ceremony. They celebrate with a dance,
13:51and while the other doctors stay at the party, Vollmer takes Hannah to the underground cave,
13:55where he shows her the Baroness portrait and a hidden bed as he tells her this is where all began
13:58for her. Back in his room, Lockhart snaps out of it thanks to the doll and starts looking more
14:03closely at the pictures of the rebuilding of the clinic. After rechecking Victoria's notes and taking a
14:08second look at the photograph in the doctor's office, he comes to a realization, Vollmer is
14:12Baron von Reichmro, and Hannah is the fetus the villagers cut off the Baroness. They've stayed young
14:17and alive thanks to the eel water. We cut back to the cave then, where Vollmer is telling Hannah that
14:22story while tying her to a bed and touching her against her will. When he's about to possess her,
14:26Lockhart interrupts them by dropping an oil can on the floor. When he's confronted with the truth,
14:31Vollmer tears off the skin of his face to reveal the burns under it before pushing Lockhart to the floor.
14:35Lockhart wastes no time and turns on a lighter that he drops on the oil, catching Vollmer on fire.
14:41The fire spreads to the main building through the ventilation shaft while Lockhart tries to
14:45rescue Hannah, but Vollmer who managed to turn off the flames on his body grabs him and throws him
14:49against some shelves. They take the fight downstairs and Vollmer grabs Lockhart again by the neck.
14:54He's about to throw him to the eels when Hannah, who managed to free herself from the bed,
14:58shows up behind him, distracts him by calling him dead then finishes him off with a shovel.
15:01Vollmer falls into the water and becomes eel food, Hannah throws the locket after him.
15:06They run outside and find the main building on fire. Doctors and nurses are screaming and running
15:11away or trying to help put off the flames, but the patients are dancing in the garden.
15:15Lockhart stares at the craziness of it at all but is brought back to reality by Hannah,
15:19who's found her bicycle. They leave the place together on the bike, and halfway through the road,
15:23a car hits them, the people driving are Lockhart's company's board of directors,
15:26who have come to check on him and Pembrose after not getting any news for days.
15:30After telling them Pembrose is gone, Lockhart refuses to get in the car.
15:34The directors asked him if he's lost his mind, and he replies he actually feels much better before
15:38driving away with Hannah on the bike and a big smile on his face.
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