No ‘Cure’ for what ails film
Incoherent and inconsequential, “A Cure for Wellness” might be the horror film for this moment in ancestry-obsessed history, if it weren’t for the most part a 146-minute waste of time.
Directed by Gore Verbinski (“Pirates of the Caribbean” films) and scripted by Justin Haythe (of Verbinski’s 2013 flop “The Lone Ranger”), the film aspires to Kubrickian perversity in its depiction of the horrors perpetrated within a Swiss sanitarium, a spa built over an ancient aquifer in the Alps where the superrich elderly go and never return.
In scenes reminiscent of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” over which we hear a snatch of song sung by a young woman in the manner of Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby,” we meet young, Nicorette addicted, neo-Master of the Universe Lockhart (Dane DeHaan, who is having his moment in the sun, although I believe winter is coming). Lockhart, who as a boy watched as his stockbroker father jumped off a New York City bridge, is sent by his masters through what looks like the Borgo Pass to the Overlook Hotel, uh, I mean, the “wellness center,” where a colleague has preceded him. After breaking a leg, Lockhart must stay longer than expected. He meets comely blond nurses dressed in white and the center’s aristocratic director Volmer (Jason Isaacs, Lucius Malfoy of the “Harry Potter” films).
Lockhart’s driver (Ivo Nandi) tells him how 200 years earlier the local baron had repudiated Christianity to marry his already pregnant-by-him sister to keep the “bloodline pure.” In the tradition of angry villagers everywhere, the Alpine rabble burned the woman alive and ripped out the fetus. What happened to the baron we do not learn. According to Volmer, the water, which Lockhart quaffs lustily, has the power to restore health and, ahem, prolong life. Lockhart also meets girlish Hannah (Mia Goth, “Nymphomanic: Vol. II”). She says she is “a special case.”
I’ll say. You may notice the entwined eels perched atop the imposing iron gates of the sanitarium and appearing in the film’s trailers. Ick. Add dental disaster and menstruation and mix vigorously. The bovine elderly patients take recreation on the sanitarium’s lavish green quad, where they play croquet and practice tai chi. Second only to infernal Quidditch, croquet is the most sinister game in literary history. No good ever comes of it. Volmer still practices hydrotherapy. Be prepared to see ancient, lumpy behinds hosed down and crepe-y, naked flesh swinging from the bone massaged and irrigated.
“A Cure for Wellness” is nothing if not a body horror film about the ravages of time upon our mortal coils. Variously evoked are “Eyes Wide Shut,” “Shutter Island,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “The Kingdom,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and the Holocaust. Like Verbinski’s vilified “The Lone Ranger,” “A Cure for Wellness” boasts first-rate production values and spectacular scenery courtesy of director of photography Bojan Bazelli. But for all its virtuosity and super-expensive finery, this “Wellness” is a sick mess.
(“A Cure for Wellness” contains nudity, much of it aged, simulated sex, violence and gruesome imagery.)