Stylised creepfest in search of a story
A Cure for Wellness 18 Cert, 146 min
Dir: Gore Verbinski; Starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth, Celia Imrie.
Gore Verbinski might be the most uneven creative mind in Hollywood. Like a grimier Tim Burton, he’s capable of sly wit and exhausting self-indulgence, in a career that has see-sawed between those modes without ever settling on a stable equilibrium.
Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean triptych, fluky follies which took the box office by storm, have enabled him to ride out an unfairly panned commercial disaster ( The Lone Ranger) and come back with A Cure for Wellness, a heebie-jeebie creepfest on a much lower budget, which has the rare distinction these days of not being adapted from anything: not a theme park ride, not a comic book, nada.
We used to call such things “original scripts”. If only this one, by Revolutionary Road screenwriter Justin Haythe, deserved the epithet. The moment Dane DeHaan’s hero, Lockhart, shows up at a sinister spa resort in the Swiss Alps and begins grilling staff about his missing boss, vast dollops of déjà vu engulf the exercise for anyone who’s seen Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island. DeHaan, who already looks like Leonardo DiCaprio’s freakier younger brother, is a City whizzkid on probation, showing up in a suit and tie which he’ll eventually shed for white institutional PJs. The clients of this dank mountain getaway are venerable retirees paying to take the water and be cured of their unspecific ailments. One is Celia Imrie, who looks in such fantastic nick that something is clearly working.
But what? It’s thumpingly apparent, as it was in the equally overscored Scorsese picture, that Very Amiss defines the scenario, and it isn’t long before the movie is suppurating with rot, placeholder intrigue, and whatever the collective noun for eels is – the things seethe out of the woodwork, maraud in bathrooms and disappear ghoulishly down people’s throats.
The spa director is Dr Heinreich Volmer, a Teutonically accented autocrat. This is an enjoyable, Christopher Lee-ish turn from Jason Isaacs, with those basilisk eyes of his proving – sorry, eels – by far the most unsettling special effect.
But it’s a long wait before we get to the bottom of whatever it is he’s doing. The movie is a series of false bottoms, wasting whole (r)eels admiring its own madhouse-cum-mausoleum production design, or building a dull relationship between DeHaan and Mia Goth, as Volmer’s ward.
A drip-feed of portents can’t stop you going stir crazy, after a while. It’s obvious that this film found a look before it found a story – the skeleton of a plot, even stretched out on the rack of a near-two-and-a-half hour running time, is missing half its vertebrae.