Get the latest gossip

Neuchatel Prescribes a Genre Cure With Health-Themed ‘Take Care’ Retrospective

NIFFF retrospective explores healthcare and control through genre cinema, from body horror to psychological thrills and Lynchian nightmares.

Covering a full century of cinematic malady — exploring how we care for others and ourselves and all the potential abuses that can arise — the retrospective casts a clinical light on the body horrors of David Cronenberg’s “Rabid” and the caretaker-from-hell anxieties of the Stephen King adaptation “Misery” while prescribing recent festival gems like Natalie Erika James’ “Relic,” which uses the visual and narrative tropes of the haunted house as shorthands for dementia. Other titles include Gore Verbinski’s Eurotrash send-up “A Cure for Wellness,” Kim Jee-Woon’s twisty K-horror melodrama “A Tale of Two Sisters” and Saverio Costanzo’s Venice prizewinner “Hungry Hearts,” which casts Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher into a nightmare of toxic codependency. Walder is similarly enthusiastic about Michael Crichton’s hospital drama “Coma,” calling it “a grand, classic ’70s paranoid thriller in all its glory” and praising its incisive exploration of “a deep societal mistrust that was especially acute in the 1970s—and which might feel even more intense if the film were made today.”

Get the Android app