This year’s Grand Jury Prize winner for best narrative feature proves (if it needed to be proved again) that it’s possible to create a fully-realized movie world on a minimal budget. Wellness brings us into a salesman’s bleak reality of crappy motel rooms, slush-covered sidewalks and 99-cent gas station hot dogs. By the end, that world has become so vivid and all-consuming, it may take hours to fully recalibrate to your own reality. That’s a compliment, by the way, to director Jake Mahaffy and his star Jeff Clark.
Clark plays Thomas Lindsey, a hard-luck sad sack who thinks he has found redemption through Wellness, a new health product that is short on particulars and long on marketing lingo.
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