For a while it seemed like nearly every female millennial literary novelist wanted to put the cult in beauty/wellness culture. And while I’m not someone who chooses books exclusively due to their tropes, I did inhale every “sinister wellness cult” novel I came across. So I offer them below, paired with films that evoked similar themes or vibes.
Gunk Baby by Jamie Marina Lau and First Reformed (2017)
I started readying Gunk Baby purely on the premise (a young woman opens a mall business doing traditional Chinese ear cleaning) but stayed for the beige-core capitalism cult and anarcho-terrorism. Like one of the below recommendations, Gunk Baby really captures the unnerving artifice of retail space.
I’m basically always recommending people watch First Reformed (directed by problematic Facebook uncle Paul Schrader), and on the surface, this is an odd pairing with Gunk Baby. However, the solitary protagonists of First Reformed and Gunk Baby share the same escalating ennui that leads to desperate action.
Check out these two if you like: alienation, radicalization, the hypocritical compromises of modern capitalism
Rouge by Mona Awad and The Sleeping Beauty (2011)
Fairytales and their retellings will always be an elite-tier genre for me. Rouge is actually not my favorite Mona Awad book (my heart belongs to All’s Well about a pill-popping theater professor trying to relive her thespian glory days). However, Awad is a bona fide expert in fairy tale criticism and theory. Rouge follows a disaffected young woman lured into the strange La Jolla spa her mother frequented in the months before her tragic death. While Rouge is not a straight retelling of any singular fairy tale, it contains elements of everything from Snow White to The Wizard of Oz to Egyptian myths in one big gothic, dreamlike, satirical, and bloody tale.
In contrast, Catherine Breillat’s The Sleeping Beauty uses the spare bones of a familiar story to evoke wonder and loss of innocence as a young girl comes of age. I watched this about a decade ago when Netflix used to have lots of hidden gems and I had a lot more free time to just pop on a random French film because the title card looked cool. I honestly don’t remember a lot about the film beyond being taken with the beautiful imagery but feeling quite uneasy by the end.
Check these two out if you like: non-Disneyfied fairy tales, pale beautiful women, French nonsense
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman and White Noise (2022)
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is about… Well I’m not sure explaining the “plot” does much service to describing the experience of the book. I’ll just plagiarize from my Goodreads review:
What begins as a quiet domestic drama burns slowly at first, then plunges urgently into the truly weird around the midpoint. This book will be lovingly shelved in my current favorite microgenre: female millennial ennui. Subcategory: surreal. Tags: alienation, veal, selfhood, cults, shark week, pica, processed snack cakes, dualism, supermarkets, paranoia, oranges.
This book’s film pairing is kind of cheating* because White Noise is based on a Don DeLillo book and the whole idea is a book plus film pairing, not a book plus book pairing. However, I have to say the uncanny grocery store sets in Mr. Greta Gerwig’s (Noah Baumbach’s) White Noise are exactly how I imagine the uncanny grocery stores scenes in You Too. Beyond that, White Noise (the film) and You Too (the book) both create an unsettling and even difficult-to-articulate experience for the viewer/reader. I’m not sure I really found either of them pleasurable to read/watch, but I’m not sure that even mattered, as both of them left a kind of misshapen imprint on my psyche for a few weeks afterwards.
Check these two out if you like: alienation, paranoia, absurdism
The Glow by Jessie Gaynor and Ingrid Goes West (2017)
The Glow follows Jane, a flailing PR professional who becomes enamored of Cass, the gorgeous and not-quite-of-this-world leader of a rustic yoga retreat. Jane is convinced that she can both turn Cass into a successful Instagram influencer and save her own career in the process. The Glow is the least outlandish novel in this list and the wellness culture satire is pretty tame by comparison to some of the others, but the first half of the book made me laugh out loud multiple times.
Ingrid Goes West is fun because 1) it features a woman named Ingrid and 2) Aubrey Plaza gets to be a moderately unhinged stalker. Although the film’s message of “social media bad” could be a little overly simplistic, it’s stylish and darkly funny enough to still be entertaining.
Check out these two if you like: desperate parasocial influencer cringe
Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang and A Cure for Wellness (2017)
Natural Beauty was a top contender for my favorite book of 2023. It follows a former piano prodigy who begins working at an exclusive beauty/wellness store after a tragic accident. Things aren’t as they seem etc. etc. and the weirdness escalates quickly. The plot goes off the rails in the final act, but at that point I didn’t even care. Huang is a magpie of grotesqueries: she seems to have takenevery repellent intrusive thought, every lingering fragment of a nightmare, every disturbing wikipedia article she ever read and twisted all of these details into a hilarious and dark novel that’s also about race and identity and beauty culture.
A Cure for Wellness was actually a recent watch for me and within the first twenty minutes, I knew would be a perfect cinematic companion for Natural Beauty. Like Natural Beauty, A Cure for Wellness begins with a cogent plot: a workaholic corporate drone is sent to Switzerland to bring back a coworker who has refused to leave an upscale sanitorium. Things get weird, then they get weirder, then you are pretty sure they won’t actually go there, but they do! It’s a wild ride and somehow also gorgeous despite the horrors.
Check these two out if you like: body horror, underground lairs, human experimentation
*Also kind of cheating because apparently I’m not the first to make this comparison.
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Bonus! A book rec for my favorite beauty cult short film!
The Outside (2022) and Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth
The Outside is the fourth episode in Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities horror anthology. It follows a quirky, introverted bank teller who believes that an as-seen-on-TV lotion will transform her into someone else. It’s based on a comic by Em Carroll.
Motherthing is about a woman who is just trying to save her husband from his passive-aggressive mother’s ghost.
Check these two out if you like: human skin, domestic horror, gelatinous things