QUICK REVIEW: A Cure For Wellness

Gore Verbinski's A Cure for Wellness is one of those films that I admire for its craftsmanship and ambition but can't really quite recommend, a visually perfect but narratively tired horror/thriller.

Dane DeHaan is Lockhart, a brash, young financial workaholic sent to a remote Swiss health spa to find a fellow exec who never came back from a two-week vacation. When Lockhart first arrives at the immaculate mountain-top “resort”, he seems mildly annoyed by the parade of white-clothed seniors playing croquet and badminton and amused by the idea that the aquifer below the spa has the power to heal all manner of modern conditions.

When his attempts to convince his cohort to leave fall on deaf ears, our arrogant hero incurs the wrath of Volmer (Jason Isaacs), the spa's administrator. A freak accident results in a broken leg, forcing Lockhart onto crutches. It's not long before he has suspicions that something quite wrong is going on, something to do with tainted water, disturbingly passive patients, a two-century feud between the spa and the locals, and... eels?

A Cure for Wellness, if nothing else, is just beautiful. Verbinski has always been a talented creator of mise en scene in a wide variety of contexts: Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring, even The Lone Ranger all did a fantastic job of immersing you into their respective worlds. The “wellness centre” of A Cure for Wellness is a triumph of production design that feels like a revamped Overlook Hotel out of The Shining, all its colours calming, its edges soft.

And there are scenes that astound, such as an increasingly claustrophobic sequence of getting lost in a series of sauna chambers, all identical yellow bricks in perfect patterns, or a truly horrific scene involving a dentist's drill, and a front tooth (yeah, people who have issues watching teeth “stuff” close your eyes, it's an image I won't ever be forgetting no matter how much I visit r/eyebleach).

But overall, the whole affair feels... tired? I had a tough time caring for Lockhart, who's a jerk at the start of the film and pretty much stays that way through to the end. It doesn't help that DeHaan has made a career out of playing twisted psychotics (see: Chronicle for a great example), making his face hard to sympathize with.

Worse, the entire mystery at the heart of the film is unnecessarily convoluted and not particularly well exposed over the course of the two-plus hours of its running time. Worst, isn't surprising in terms of pure mystery or theme. Horror is scary not just because of what's on the screen, but because of what it connects to in the viewer's real world, and A Cure for Wellness doesn't really evoke much in the way of psychological or social fears.

This is, of course, a Verbinskian concern. He is very much a product of the Jerry Bruckheimer system, a visual experimentalist who's nearly an auteur in the way he deals with colour and texture, but very much someone you'd accurately say makes films that are more “style than substance”. Only this time his sensual experience isn't matched by the script, and the result is a genre trifle that I don't think will appeal to many.