Several recent clinical films have problematised the socio-medical and psychological aspects of the contemporary first world culture of wellness and healthism: The Road to Wellville (Alan Parker, 1994), Hotel Splendide (Terence Gross, 2000), Youth (Paolo Sorrentino, 2015), A Cure for Wellness (Gore Verbinski, 2016); Lunacy (Síleni, Jan Svankmajer, 2005), Johanna (Kornél Mundruczó, 2005), Pál Adrienn (Ágnes Kocsis, 2010), Godless (Bezbog, Ralitza Petrova, 2016) and Scarred Hearts (Inimi cicatrizate, Radu Jude, 2016), which are all set in closed medical institutions designed to rejuvenate or heal their patients/guests, where the protective but at the same time claustrophobic and disciplining microcosm of the hotel/sanatorium/hospital appears as a carefully monitored, safely contained counter-space of external (social) and internal (bodily) risks. As Michel Foucault argues, the disappearance of bedside medicine and the "sick man" after the Enlightenment era was followed by the emergence of hospital medicine and the patient in the 19th century (Foucault 1963), and it seems that the 20th century witnessed the births of the wellness guest and the care home inmate in an increasingly medicalised, somatised and normalised world. On the basis of this insight, the present paper aims to position the chosen clinical films along a biopolitical trajectory of care, outlining the emergence of 21st century notions of health and precarious embodiment in Western and Eastern European cultural scenarios.
