‘A Cure’ does not quite take
Masterful but flawed horror film falls off track
Though Gore Verbinski has made a name for himself with big studio pictures like “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “The Lone Ranger,” he’s always had a weird streak — a “one for them, one for me” mentality. So his credits include surprises like “The Weather Man” and “Rango.”
“A Cure for Wellness” — a horror film set at a spa in the Swiss Alps — is definitely one for him. Here, “wellness” could easily be euphemism for “wealth.”
A powerful Wall Street banker named Pembroke (Harry Groener) runs off to a Swiss spa and writes back to his colleagues about truths that he can’t “unsee,” telling them he will not be returning to New York.
So the firm sends an upstart young banker named Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) to bring him back and stave off a business emergency. Lockhart’s superiors press him into action with threats of blackmail.
The young man swaggers into the spa like he owns the place but finds it’s not easy to get his boss— or himself — out of it and on the next flight to New York. Soon,
Lockhart is suffering from the kind of maladies for which everyone here is seeking a cure, and the staff keeps pushing him to drink the spa’s special water.
Ultimately, Lockhart gets drawn into a morbid tale about the spa’s history, involving a mad baron, a baroness, his sister and the villagers who burned the place to the ground.
Written by Verbinski and Justin Haythe, the film was inspired by Thomas Mann’s 1924 book “The Magic Mountain,” and yet the concerns feel very 21stcentury. The film deftly depicts a desire to retreat from the pressures and ruthlessness of contemporary living, perhaps akin to the attempts by many to achieve clarity and soulfulness through yoga, diets and mindfulness apps. It also depicts how that desire can be exploited.
A theme running through “A Cure for Wellness” is the danger and inherent evil in striving for a pure bloodline. It turns out the baron was so obsessed with that goal, he resorted to incest, and was driven to madness.
Stylistically, “A Cure for Wellness” is an odd film — exceedingly wellcrafted and given the kind of attention to detail, design, composition and camera movement that has been abandoned in most recent horror films, which strive instead for a jarring sense of realism.
The production design of blues, greens and yellows complements DeHaan’s ice-blue eyes and pale features. Yet the filmmakers still deliver splashes of the gruesome violence demanded by the genre.
Through its two-anda-half-hours, “A Cure for Wellness” ratchets up the dread. But in the final act, it fumbles — to become a sort of 1930s Universal-style psychosexual monster flick.
Even so, Verbinski’s new one is likely to inspire a cultish fascination.