Last night I finished watching The Healing and found myself thinking less about the story it wanted to tell and more about how it was built. I’m not touching the creative choices behind the plot because those belong to the writer’s own world, and creativity should stay free from that kind of judgement. But the technical side of this film kept pulling my attention in ways I couldn’t ignore.

And then there is Sergey. He is almost a phantom figure in the plot, appearing mostly in memory, as if he exists only in the space of her fear. But the way his presence returns near the end makes it clear that the obstacle she must escape isn’t the cult or the forest but the echo of him carried inside her. He feels like a character the film deliberately hides until the final decision point, the way a game leaves a final boss unseen until the player is forced to confront them. That structure shapes how the tension unfolds, even when the story isn’t trying to be subtle about it.

What really shaped my watching, though, was how unmistakably game-like the entire production feels. The dialogue reads like a scripted sequence, the kind you’d expect to click through in a branching narrative game. Reviewers even mention how the flashbacks and rituals are arranged in repeating loops, almost like scenes you could replay from different angles. The characters speak in a way that feels stiff, as if their voices were layered on afterwards without matching the movement of their mouths. Macabre Daily actually notes that the English dub mixes unevenly, which explains the strange disconnect I couldn’t stop noticing. It reminded me of playing something like Unforgiving, where the voice-over follows you just a little too closely, telling you what to think, where to go, what to be afraid of next.

There is beauty in its ambition, no doubt. The rural twilight, the ritual imagery, the disorienting shifts between past and present; reviewers praise the scenery and the effects for a reason. But that ambition is tied so tightly to its structure that the suspense becomes predictable. A game can afford predictability... you expect danger, you know when death is coming, you learn the patterns. A film needs a different kind of tension, something more fluid, more unexpected. The Healing doesn’t always let itself break away from its own patterns, and because of that, every escalation feels like another step in a track you’ve already seen from above.

Watching it felt like stepping into an experience that didn’t entirely decide whether it wanted to be a movie or a playable narrative. But maybe that’s why it lingers a little. It makes you think about pain as something programmed into a person, something they keep bumping into until they finally find a way out. Or think they do.

Labels: motivation, MovieMarathon