A Cure for Wellness

Gore Verbinski's A Cure for Wellness is one of the best looking bad movies I've seen in a long time.  The design of the individual rooms and seemingly endless corridors that make up the film's sanitarium setting are appropriately off-putting, and create a certain sense of dread.  But that's all the movie can muster in terms of thrills.  It's all atmosphere, attached to a story that's not worth the journey it takes to get to the end.

And what an interminable journey this movie puts us through.  At a length of two and a half hours, A Cure for Wellness not only long overstays its welcome, it seems to struggle to fill that time to begin with, which just makes you wonder why this movie wasn't shortened to a more manageable length.  To be fair, the movie is intriguing for the first hour or so.  We're drawn in by the beautiful images, and the early stages of the mystery.  Then the middle portion hits, and the screenplay by Justin Haythe (who worked on the script for Verbinski's equally bloated Lone Ranger film from 2013) just spins its wheels, almost like it's killing time.  When the third act comes, all credibility is thrown out the window by a final reveal that is not only easy to guess from the information that we're given, but also is so bombastic and over the top that it earns bad laughs from the audience.  I'm sure the movie will have its defenders.  Most do.  They'll say at least the movie isn't rehashing the same tired old Hollywood thriller formula, and are attempting something new.  I agree.  But in this case, new does not equal good.

The story opens with a young and ambitious Wall Street type named Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), who is given a mission by his board of directors to travel to an exclusive health spa for the wealthy in the Swiss Alps, and bring home a CEO named Pembroke (Harry Groener), who left to vacation there two weeks ago, and now refuses to leave.  He has sent his former company a long and rambling letter about "mankind's sickness", and the company board need him back in New York in order to finalize a deal.  Lockhart comes across as a troubled young man, pale-skinned, drained of energy, and haunted by nightmares of a childhood trauma.  When he arrives at the spa, he finds it headed by the mysterious Dr. Volmer (Jason Isaacs), who is not the type to give out information on his guests and patients.  The entire staff seems to simply give Lockhart the run around.  When he finally does track down Pembroke, just like in his letter, he refuses to follow the young man home to New York.

Lockhart gets in his car to head to a nearby hotel to try to figure out his next move, only to get in a car accident.  When he comes to, it's been three days, his leg is in a cast, and he is now a patient of Dr. Volmer, who promises him the best care possible.  But right from the start, there's something just not right about this place where the wealthy go to have "toxins removed from their bodies".  The staff are tight lipped and downright aggressive whenever Lockhart starts asking questions, or wandering around certain areas of the building.  There's also the issue of certain patients disappearing rather suddenly, and never returning.  Sometimes late at night, he can see a shadowy figure taking bodies on stretches through a door in a separate building that is locked at all times.  There's also the mysterious and waif-like girl Hannah (Mia Goth), who apparently has spent her entire life at Volmer's clinic, but oddly can't provide any real answers.

And so the movie lurches slowly forward, deliberately laying out tiny pieces of information.  There's a little town at the foot of the mountain where the clinic rests that seems to be filled with some rather unfriendly people, and there are mysterious rooms within the walls of the spa that seem to hint at something much more sinister and possibly murderous going on.  Oh, and there are eels.  Lots and lots of eels.  Lockhart starts to have hallucinations (Or are they actually real?) concerning eels in isolation tanks, in bathtubs, and even in the toilet.  Do we get an explanation for all of this?  Yeah, we actually do, but trust me, when it does come you'll want to go right back to wondering what it all means.  Like so many other promising thrillers, A Cure for Wellness doesn't know how or even when to wrap itself up.  And the longer it goes, the patience of the audience grows shorter.

I can admire that the film is wonderfully made on a technical level, and features some stunning images.  But when it comes to the plot and the pacing, everything kind of falls apart.  I can even admire what Verbinski was trying to pull off here.  He obviously wanted to make a very cerebral and psychological thriller.  But then he betrays his own ambitions in the last half with a climax so over the top, it's like something out of a bad slasher movie from the 80s.  The only thing missing is for the villain to start throwing out corny one liners, ala Freddy Krueger.  It's always sad to see a potentially smart movie go dumb in the homeward stretch, but I should have seen it coming, given the movie seemed to be delaying the inevitable for most of the middle portion.

Aside from some atmospheric settings and a couple scenes built around phobias, there's nothing really all that exciting to find here.  A jolt of black humor could have really livened this movie up.  As it is, we have about an hour or so of intrigue, followed by over an hour where the film goes limp, and a final 15 minutes that just goes dumb.  This is the kind of movie that could send audiences silently slinking for the theater exit long before it's over.

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