A Cure For Wellness
★★☆☆☆
Dir: Gore Verbinski, 146 mins, starring: Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Celia Imrie, Mia Goth, Adrian Schiller, Carl Lumbly, Susanne Wuest
As if determined to move as far away as possible from the high jinks of Pirates Of The Caribbean, Gore Verbinski has now come up with this visually spectacular but muddled and pretentious Magic Mountainstyle yarn. With its surrealistic palate, A Cure For Wellness seems at times like one of Tim Burton’s darker offerings but it conspicuously lacks the charm and wit that Burton invariably brings to his work. The film takes itself very seriously and that’s part of the problem.
Early on, this seems to be shaping up as a grim satire about ruthless, unhappy Wall Street folk. The film begins in grim fashion with a prolonged scene of a heart attack of one senior executive, dying at his desk. Dane DeHaan plays Lockhart, a young and ambitious employee at the same firm. He is crooked but not as crooked as his bosses.
They're planning a merger and need the signature of the chief executive Pembroke, who has gone AWOL and is holed up in a spa in faraway Switzerland, where he appears to have become a rabid anti-capitalist. Lockhart is despatched to bring him back. The spa is presided over by Dr Heinrich Volmer (Jason Isaacs), who is a cross between Bela Lugosi and Basil Fawlty. It is full of seemingly sweet natured geriatrics who spend their days playing croquet or solving crossword puzzles. Lockhart is in a great rush to get back to New York but ends up becoming a very long term resident.
A Cure For Wellness is a wildly over-determined affair. It has trappings of Gothic horror; plentiful references to Hitchcock, Kubrick and Von Trier; sci-fi elements; moments which wouldn't be out of place in the most precious European art house film, and it plays at times like a complex conspiracy thriller. Individual scenes are very striking indeed. There's a spectacular car crash, one of the most gruesome dentistry drilling scenes this side of Marathon Man, and lots of phantasmagoric imagery of eels coiling and slithering their way round characters.
Verbinski makes very imaginative use of the labyrinthine layout of the spa building, with its bath houses, laboratories, lifts and hidden corridors. He creates an oppressive, dreamlike atmosphere. We’re never quite sure whether Lockhart’s visions are “real” or are a result of overwork and childhood trauma. The spa is bizarrely reminiscent of the hotel featured in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster. It is impossible to tell whether its residents are guests, inmates, patients or test tube dummies for Volmer’s infernal experiments.
One strategic mistake is to put the leading man's leg in plaster for almost the entire movie. A broken leg may have worked for James Stewart in Rear Window, but here it means that DeHaan is forever hobbling. It becomes increasingly frustrating watching him struggle to reach his next destination. The fact that his crutches can be used as weapons is only a very minor compensation.
It doesn’t help, either, that the film has such an interminable running time. We end up spending so long with Lockhart in the spa that cabin fever soon sets in. Justin Haythe’s screenplay takes some very surprising turns. There are queasy moments in which Lockhart almost drowns in a water tank because the medical orderly is too busy masturbating to notice that his oxygen tube is dislodged. Incest, sexual abuse and plentiful imagery of foetuses are thrown into the mix. There are lots of self-conscious anachronisms. The film is set in the present day but everybody in the spa behaves as if they’re stuck in the 1920s. Up at these rarefied heights in the Swiss Alps, mobile phones don’t work. The spa’s filing system is paper based.
“There is a terrible darkness here,” Celia Imrie’s sweet natured old lady tells Lockhart. The spa is built on the site of a castle which was set on fire by the townsfolk two centuries before because of the infernal doings of the wicked baron who owned it. One patient, Hannah (Mia Goth), a dreamy-like ingenue who looks like a younger version of Shelley Duvall in The Shining, has some sinister connection with Volmer which only gradually becomes apparent.
A Cure For Wellness is rich and strange but ultimately very frustrating. For all of its visual ingenuity and its wealth of ideas, its plotting is turgid in the extreme. By the final reel, many viewers will be suffering from the same deadening, enervating feeling – the sense of extreme torpor, bafflement. and absolute befuddlement – that seems to afflict the residents in the spa.
in spite of its high-profile cast. It is very violent, very sentimental, and has one of Nic Cage’s most deranged and eccentric performances yet as the main villain.
Adrian Grenier (from Entourage) plays successful small businessman JP. Johnathon Schaech is his older, ne’er-do-well brother, Mikey. As we discover in flashbacks, they grew up amid poverty and violence. JP has prospered whereas Mikey is divorced and destitute. He has been drummed out of the marines and has borrowed money from JP which he has then used to try to buy and sell drugs. Cage plays Eddie King, a mobster with more than a passing resemblance to British comedian Paul Whitehouse. He wears an absurd wig and gold necklace, has a handlebar moustache and looks throughout the film as if he is about to burst out into song. His lounge-lizard appearance belies his brutality.
Steven C Miller shoots the violence in very stylised fashion, with lots of slow motion of bullets spiralling and droplets of blood hanging in the air. Eddie is the type who’ll rip off the face of his antagonists or smash them up with baseball bats. Like every other character in the movie, he’s also prey to extreme self-pity. The plotting is very contrived. Eddie kidnaps Mikey (everyone thinks with Mikey’s collusion) and then demands $350,000 from JP as a ransom. That’s precisely the amount JP can raise if he sells off all his assets. John Cusack is an undercover detective who dresses like a rap star (in back to front baseball cap and sunglasses).
The film was originally going to be shot in Philadelphia but decamped to the deep south, presumably to take advantage of tax breaks there. The Mississippi settings at least allow Miller to give the film a certain sweaty intensity. In their own warped way, the brothers are utterly devoted to one another.
There is something almost comical about the way that JP puts his brother’s well-being ahead of his family or business interests. “It is my turn to protect you, big bro, we’re going to kill those motherfuckers,” he tells his sibling. This is absolutely not a film that warrants a cinema release but it might just qualify as a guilty pleasure for fans nostalgic for mindless, macho, straight-to-video action movies.