A teen suspects her debilitating illness may have been purposely caused by her biotech billionaire parents.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Nancy Leopardi
Starring: Samantha Cochran, David Dastmalchian, Ashley Greene, Sydney Taylor, Tyler Lawrence Gray
The screenwriting duo of Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer are best known for penning Steven Soderbergh's Unsane. That thriller saw Claire Foy play a young woman who finds herself involuntarily confined to a sinister psychiatric institution. Bernstein and Greer's latest collaboration, The Cure, has similar themes of medical malpractice, gaslighting and confinement. It suffers from the same plotting issues that dogged Unsane (a character wears a t-shirt emblazoned with that film's title at one point here) but doesn't have Soderbergh's slick direction or a Foy-level lead to paper over its cracks.
Directed in flat fashion by Nancy Leopardi, The Cure stars Samantha Cochran as Ally, a 16-year-old who was adopted a decade earlier by married multi-millionaire philanthropists Jeff (David Dastmalchian) and Georgia (Ashley Greene). Soon after her adoption, Ally was stricken by a rare form of Lupus. In the years since, Ally has lived a solitary life, confined to her family's beachside mansion. That changes when Ally sneaks out one day and makes a friend in rebellious teen Brooke (Sydney Taylor).
Ally's parents aren't too keen on their daughter making new friends, but they decide to give in and actually pay Brooke to hang out with Ally. The two quickly become BFFs, and maybe something more, but Brooke has ulterior motives. She has her eye on the family's well-stocked medicine cabinet, hoping she can plunder some meds that might help her wheelchair-bound brother Robbie (Tyler Lawrence Gray). But as Brooke snoops around, she begins to suspect that Ally's adoptive parents have sinister intentions towards her.
Even at a relatively brief 90 minutes, The Cure overstays its welcome. The audience will figure out what's really at play here early on, and so it's something of a chore waiting for the movie to finally spill the unsurprising beans over an hour into its run time. Let's be real - nobody is thinking Georgia and Jeff are anything but wrong 'uns. Jeff is played by David bloody Dastmalchian for a start, so we know he's up to no good, while Greene plays the adoptive mother in the fashion of a wicked stepmother from a classic fairy tale (she's very good at this sort of thing to be fair - check out her eerie turn in the underseen thriller Some Other Woman). It's simply impossible to believe that Ally has spent a decade with these weirdos and failed to realise they're up to no good.
It doesn't help that The Cure is dogged by so many plot inconsistencies. For example, despite hiring a dark web hacker, Robbie fails to find any proof of Georgia and Jeff's existence, but later another character simply googles their names and is immediately greeted with news stories about their charity work. There are moments that are thrown in for shock value, such as a bizarre incident involving a deranged old lady, that are left unexplained, as though the script was severely butchered and threads were left dangling.
Jeff and Georgia's nefarious scheme involves seeking a way to extend life. With so much media attention given to Bryan Johnson, the real life multi-millionaire oddball who has devoted his fortune to finding a way to cheat the aging process, this is a subject ripe for cinematic exploitation. But The Cure just drops the idea into the mix without ever examining it in any satisfying way. We're left to wonder what someone like David Cronenberg might have made of this premise.
The Cure is on UK/ROI VOD from April 13th.
