A Cure For Wellness, in theaters this weekend, is not a movie for everybody. It’s going to make people upset. It’s going to make people angry. It’s going to offend people. It’s going to scare people, and confuse people, and, inevitably, some people are going to tell you that they were just so damn bored. After all, it’s a horror movie where nearly nothing “scary” happens for the first hour or more, and it ultimately stretches to a gargantuan runtime of 2 hours and 26 minutes. There will be people who try to insist that this isn’t a horror movie, and they will try to force it into a “thriller” category. Genre-policing is dumb, but those people are wrong.

Because, I fundamentally disagree that the primary aim of horror is to “scare.” I think the best horror does more than just make you jump. I think the best horror gives us permission to explore something dark and unsettling in the human condition, some deep desire to gaze into the unfathomable abyss and discover how it gazes back at us. Horror doesn’t just frighten. It disturbs, and it disturbs not only us but the social order around us. What happens when everything we think we know falls to pieces? What happens when we fall to pieces?

That’s the territory A Cure for Wellness explores. The film doesn’t just want to make you cringe, or jump, or scream in shock, although it does do that. It’s also asking you to confront something else, some emotion less easily put into words. This is a movie about standing at the edge of a yawning chasm of insanity, then leaning over the cliff to peer into the darkness below, hoping you don’t lose your balance. It’s about how we keep the tiniest hold on our humanity, when everything is conspiring to strip it away.

And it does it by putting a million familiar horror tropes in a blender set to puree, and using the resulting mixture as just one ingredient in something that somehow feels new. Have I mentioned that it’s gorgeous to look at, from the first frame to the last?