A CURE FOR WELLNESS (2016) is an average horror thriller dressed up as art. I enjoyed it but found it failing to live up to its extraordinary potential.

The story begins with Lockhart, who is assigned by his employers to travel to a restored castle in a remote town in the Swiss Alps to retrieve Mr. Pembroke, one of the financial firm’s partners who has entered a wellness center and won’t come home. Lockhart’s flaw is he despises weakness and believes one can only survive by being ruthless. He travels to the center but ends up in a car accident, resulting in him becoming one of the patients. Along the way, he unravels the mystery of the “cure” that the patients are hooked and the mystery of the castle itself. He solves his flaw by caring for another person, Hannah, the mad scientist’s daughter.

The film is visually beautiful, laced with mystery, and featuring a horror element that is intriguing. However, when all is revealed, it’s interesting but pretty conventional stuff. Part of the problem is A CURE FOR WELLNESS sprawls and is weakly structured, making you wait seemingly endlessly for that reveal, and the protagonist simply wasn’t likeable enough to keep me invested. In that way, it reminded me of some of Tim Burton’s movies, which I love to look at but otherwise bored me to tears. I think for me I had a problem with big expectations. The trailer was amazing, promising a lurid psychological horror mystery, but in the end it delivered fairly conventional fare with great visuals.

As a side note, 20th Century Fox, the production company, got into trouble by creating fake news websites to promote the film. Big mistake.

All said, A CURE FOR WELLNESS is a visually arresting and otherwise somewhat engaging film, but doesn’t deliver on its extraordinary potential.

RAW (2017) is a French film about a young woman’s awakening that happens to include a genetic desire for human flesh. A strait-laced and innocent vegetarian, Justine is attending her first week of veterinary school, following in the footsteps of her parents and more experienced sister Alexa. The week includes heavy hazing, drinking, partying and sex, students trying to fit in within a brutal academic and social environment. In one humiliating ritual, the freshmen are splattered with animal blood and required to eat a sliver of raw meat, in Justine’s case a kidney.

This taste of meat awakens her desire, a deep and all-consuming hunger for human flesh. She tries to satiate it with alcohol and sex, but it’s a losing battle. Her older sister Alexa wants to guide her through it, but Alexa’s domineering nature and Justine’s resistance combine to set their sibling rivalry ablaze.

My only criticism is as with other movies, much of the narrative tension relies on people not asking basic questions and communicating. “Oh, I’m a cannibal, I’ll just roll with it,” is not something we’d expect someone to think. I’m good with misunderstandings propelling conflict, but in this case there’s an utter failure to communicate, resulting in over the top drama. I was also oversold on the film being disturbing and erotic. It is, but not that much for viewers familiar with the genre.

Still, RAW has real strength, visually compelling, constantly intriguing and occasionally gross. It’s a coming of age story about a girl discovering herself, exploring her desires and asserting herself in the world–with cannibalism functioning both as metaphor and a very real thing. It’s also a film about love–the sisters’ rivalry appears to stem from both Justine asserting herself and the sisters loving each other so much it compels them to provoke excuses to bite. About loving so much you want to eat, about loving so much you’re willing to be eaten.

Overall, RAW is a visually arresting and titillating film combining cannibalism with sibling rivalry and erotic overtones, not your usual fare, and for me that made it a fun movie to watch.

The directorial debut of Jordan Peele of Key and Peele fame, GET OUT (2017) is an okay horror movie but its concepts are intriguing.

Chris, a Black photographer, travels with his White girlfriend Rose Armitage to visit her parents at their rural estate. Chris is struck by how White the community is, a situation that is made even more uncomfortable by the people he meets making racial comments and asking racial questions. The only Black people he meets are the help, and their strange Stepford quality puts him on edge. When he meets another Black man acting strangely and whom Chris thinks he knows, things start to unravel for him and he learns the truth. He is there for a very specific reason.

As a horror movie, the film is okay. I found the pacing clunky and a bit slow, the horror elements fairly standard for the fare. The film’s racial subject matter, however, makes it feel bold and fresh. While horror movies have long tackled uncomfortable political and social topics, in my view this is the first that takes on race in such a provocative way.

Peele made the film during the “post-racial” Obama years, when White American society congratulated itself on conquering overt racism. What Chris encounters is a different kind of racism, a kinder form of it often ascribed to liberals but could actually be ascribed to White people generally. He is asked questions like whether he regards Black as being an advantage or disadvantage, and admired as a Black man for having natural stereotyped perceived advantages such as athletic ability, sexual process and natural cool. Living in their ivory community, the Whites in the movie actually envy Chris for being Black, showing ignorance of what being Black in America really entails despite the cultural whitewashing.

The result is B for storytelling, A for ideas. The vehicle felt pretty standard to me, but the ideas it conveys make the film feel bold and fresh.