A few weeks ago I ventured out to a local multiplex and watched the Gore Verbinski-directed Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. I liked it a lot – possibly more than anyone else I know or have read who saw it. Besides getting me to check out a terrific interview with the film’s writer Matthew Robinson, it also prompted me to finally watch Verbinski’s previous film, A Cure for Wellness. While that film came out a decade ago, it felt uncannily prescient – specifically, it felt uncannily prescient about a certain trend in American politics playing out right now.

In interviews, Verbinski has discussed how Sam Rockwell’s character in Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die is light-years removed from who you’d expect to be the lead in a science fiction action movie. I’m a fan of that approach; one of the things I like about Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin is the way that it’s centered around a man who has no business being at the epicenter of a story of international intrigue. A Cure for Wellness begins with a long sequence establishing a high-powered executive in a finance company – only for him to drop dead of a massive heart attack.

That’s where Lockhart (Dale DeHaan) enters the story: he’s promoted to replace the dead man, and is also tasked with retrieving the head of the company, who has settled in in a luxury spa in Switzerland. Notably, Lockhart is not a traditional hero: we learn that he is an amoral finance bro in the first scene where we meet him, and in subsequent scenes we also learn that he’s been embezzling. The executives above him aren’t appalled by this; instead, they’re disappointed that he didn’t do a better job with it. 

And so off Lockhart goes to Switzerland, and when he arrives at the castle where the spa is situated, he quickly demonstrates an unparalleled degree of entitlement and Ugly American-ness. It’s worth stating here that the film does reveal a fairly harrowing backstory for him; there’s a sense that he’s adopted this utterly ruthless personality as a coping mechanism.

When he finally meets the absent CEO, the older man is absolutely steadfast in his conviction that he will not return with his young employee. He’s become convinced that the work that he was involved with is actively harmful, and he wants nothing to do with it. He also admits to feeling guilt over his role in Lockhart’s father’s death by suicide – an act that the young Lockhart watched happen. And, look, this is the thing: nothing we’ve seen in the film so far suggests that the older man is wrong. Pretty much every high-ranking employee of this company we’ve seen is amoral at best and actively venal at worst. In other words, this criticism lands because it’s true.

But if you think that there’s something amiss about a Master of the Universe type having an epiphany while at an absurdly luxurious Alpine resort that presumably costs an absurd amount to visit, well, you’re entirely correct. As Lockhart learns more about the sanatorium, he finds evidence that something sinister is afoot here, possibly involving eels, and definitely involving the head of the operation, Dr. Heinreich Volmer (Jason Isaacs).

[Major spoilers follow]

The doctor, it transpires, has been creating a bizarre concoction involving mineral water and eels that effectively halts aging. It turns out that he is the nobleman with a penchant for incest whose medical experiments led to an uprising against him more than a century earlier, and the young woman in his care (Mia Goth) is actually his daughter, who he plans to wed. It’s all very Aguirre, the Wrath of God with proto-fascism thrown into the mix. 

It would have been very easy for this film to go an easier route: to undermine the CEO’s epiphany or portray the doctor as a kind of proto-class warrior. Instead, Lockhart winds up in a situation where there are no good options except to escape the entire operation – and, by film’s end, that’s exactly what’s happened, with DeHaan and Goth riding a bicycle away from both the burning castle and the finance executives who are utterly dumbfounded as to what’s going on.

To watch this in 2026 also left me viewing the film as a kind of parable for the current state of conservative politics in the U.S. Lockhart never discusses politics on screen, but it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that he’d be a reliably Republican voter. And what do his choices end up being? On one hand, there’s the faux-populism espoused by the CEO, who criticizes the industry in which he made his fortune but doesn’t seem to be remotely concerned with ameliorating its effects on society. On the other, there’s the doctor and his work, which now plays like a satire of, well, wellness culture – and has at its center a proto-Nazi with a eugenicist bent. 

At a time in American politics where both right-wing populism and the “MAHA” movement are both ascendant, you don’t have to look too hard to see aspects of both present in this film. And while I wouldn’t call A Cure for Wellness an overtly political film, its critique nonetheless stings – even more than it did upon this film’s initial release.