Healed

Healed is an unfocused, mostly forgettable movie that has the misfortune of evoking several much better movies with similar premises.

Jazz and Olivia are a married couple expecting a baby. Before the birth, they attend a modern wellness retreat. To influencer Jazz’s dismay, the retreat also has no wifi! While Olivia is immediately sold on the retreat, cynical Jazz takes longer to talk round. Right as guru Georgia is making in-roads with Jazz, Olivia starts acting strange and distant. There is more going on to this retreat than meditation and wellness.

First off, I’m mostly sick of this sort of sinister retreat-type story. I feel I’ve seen a lot of variations on it already, most of them better than Healed. The retreat is a good way to have a small cast and imitated locations. But I don’t think Healed goes far enough with the potential. Little here is unique and it takes too long for anything interesting to happen. Before that, we just have Olivia liking meditation and Jazz being cynical which is not exactly gripping. This is additionally true as we see Georgia’s true plan far before the characters do. So there’s no tension, we already know Georgia’s doing some behaviour modification stuff.

Eventually, far too late, the true nature of the retreat comes to the forefront. And for me, it mostly just begged questions such as why, how and who? Some of these questions technically get answers, but this evil retreat backstory feels implausible and not well fleshed out. The long and short of it is they’re doing behaviour modification because homophobia. And I think that homophobic element is supposed to answer these questions. The who or how doesn’t matter because the why is homophobia and that’s bad and we can cheer for the villains to fail. But this is the most absurd, impractical homophobic plan I’ve seen in a minute.

While sections of Healed made me long for better movies like Get Out, The One I Love or The Stepford Wives, Healed has an even closer comparison. You’re Not Supposed to Be Here is also a recent thriller about a lesbian couple expecting a baby who go to a retreat where everything is not as it seems. And Healed is better than that by a tiny, 1% margin. Neither movie is good, and Healed being slightly better doesn’t mean I am going to recommend it. This is the kind of forgettable movie where you spend the film’s whole runtime thinking of other, better films.

Overall rating: 4.3/10

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