FILM OFFERS NO CURE FOR BOREDOM
A CURE FOR WELLNESS out of 5 Starring: Dane DeHaan, Mia Goth, Jason Isaacs Director: Gore Verbinski Duration: 146 minutes I had the whooping cough this winter — weeks of fitful hacking and breathlessness that hounded my days and perturbed my sleep. And yet it seemed shorter and more agreeable than this so-called thriller in which a businessman is trapped in an evil Swiss spa. Never mind A Cure for Wellness: Director and co-writer Gore Verbinski has concocted a cure for self-pity. No garden-variety pertussis can compete with these two and a half hours of dull, aching unpleasantness.
Dane DeHaan stars as Lockhart, whose Wall Street employer sends him to retrieve its CEO, who went to visit a mysterious wellness centre in the Swiss Alps — played by Germany’s lovely Hohenzollern Castle — and never came back. “Who the hell ‘takes the waters’ in the 21st century?” wonders Lockhart. It won’t be the last who/what/why the hell question on audiences’ minds as the wonky story unfolds.
Lockhart arrives at the castle and finds creepy, wrought-iron gates and, just beyond, an unsettling, zombielike groundskeeper. (I’m just going to lay out a few more adjectives here — spooky freaky weird strange dismal chilling screwy annoying eerie — and let you sprinkle them through the review as you see fit. Much like the muddled puddle that is this film’s plot, it won’t matter precisely where they land.)
The sanatorium, a model of Germanic efficiency and precisely pointillist umlauts, is run by a whitecoat named Volmer (Jason Isaacs). He’s not keen to let Lockhart see his boss, but after insisting a little too vehemently that these are patients and not prisoners, he agrees to arrange a meeting for later in the day. Alack, as Lockhart is being driven away from the castle, a Miseryesque car crash ensues. And who better to nurse him back to health than Volmer and his staff?
What follows just keeps following. Verbinski’s first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, back in 2003, ran to two hours and 23 minutes; his second was 2:31 and his third 2:49. With the exception of Rango and a very early effort called Mousehunt, he seems incapable of making a long story short.
And so Lockhart keeps learning more and more disturbing things about the sanatorium, until he freaks out and tries to run, only to be knocked out and taken back.
The horrors he witnesses include rattling toilet tanks, calmly demented patients, tepid drinking water, evil dentistry, low-wattage bulbs, eels and a massive, budget-busting sensory deprivation tank which looks like a cross between an iron lung and cryogenic storage.
The one thing A Cure for Wellness has going for it is a great cast, whom I would gladly watch in anything else.
DeHaan comes convincingly unglued as the film progresses; Isaacs keeps a lid on his character’s real intentions until Justin Haythe’s ham-handed screenplay won’t let him pretend any longer; and the wonderful Celia Imrie is delightful as a fellow patient obsessed with the castle’s dark history.
To this talented crew add the aptly named Mia Goth as Hannah, an Ophelia type who flits through the film, tantalizing Lockhart with her weeping willow tresses, and awakening his protective instincts by seeming to be always about to fall into a pond or topple from the battlements.
But the cast is engaged in a losing battle against Verbinski, who keeps piling on oddities until the film threatens to collapse under its own lunacy. Why the 10-minute prologue in which Lockhart’s co-worker suffers a heart attack? Why does Lockhart’s addled mother confidently proclaim “You won’t come back?” Why the constant flashbacks to his father’s death? Who the hell “takes the waters” in the 21st century, anyway?
But the biggest question is why the film continues to lumber forward like a wounded water buffalo 30 minutes after the beans have been spilled and the mysteries spelled out for the audience. Verbinski seems to think we’re still invested in his story, when the more likely reaction is to want to divest ourselves from it, and fast.