WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
How much you enjoy A Cure For Wellness will depend solely on your tolerance for silliness. It’s a film with a ridiculous premise, with more twists and turns than a cheap garden hose, but if you can find something within its messy core to be interested in, it’s, at the very least, fairly substantial entertainment
The plot in a nutshell: A young Wall-Street business mogul (Dane DeHaan) is sent by his company to a wellness center in the Swiss Alps. He is to retrieve a co-worker – Mr. Pembroke (Harry Groener) – and bring him back to New York so he can face the consequences of some sketchy business practices. When he arrives, he discovers the facility’s treatments are, to say the least, more than a bit mysterious, and decides to stay longer than planned to get to the bottom of these strange goings on.
The premise is simple enough for any dime-a-dozen horror-thriller, but director Gore Verbinski and his writer Justin Haythe aren’t interested in staying grounded. The screenplay seems to favor cheap thrills and unreasoned ambiguity over logic and thoughtfulness, which is okay, if you can tolerate it. As DeHaan’s character, who, if my memory is correct, is only ever referred to by last name – “Mr. Lockhart” – wanders deeper and deeper into this facility and discovers the increasingly shady “therapy” procedures taking place, the whole thing becomes harder and harder to believe.
This in itself isn’t a dilemma. The problem is that it’s difficult to figure out whether or not this is the filmmaker’s intention. During the many scenes of extreme physical torture and grotesqueness, are we supposed to repelled, or are we supposed to understand the motivation? Are we supposed to throw our hands up and willfully abandon any hopes for realism, or are we supposed to be repulsed by the sights on the screen, yet also garner empathy for those involved?
This lack of clarity can be attested to the fact that DeHaan’s character . . . well, isn’t much of a character at all. He isn’t particularly likable, or even that interesting, but he isn’t unlikable or completely boring either. He is at the center of almost every single scene of this two-and-a-half-hour film, and by the end of it, I couldn’t assign to him a single character trait.
The film stays consistently interesting, though (even at its most ridiculous), because of Verbinski’s world-building. DeHaan spends exceedingly large portions of the film wandering down hallways and opening doors he shouldn’t be opening. We’re always interested in seeing what crazy contraptions are behind each new door, considerably less so in how he’ll react. This story might have made a terrific horror survival video game.
Jason Isaacs plays the villain, Dr. Heinreich Volmer, the director of the facility, who spends the whole film following our protagonist around spouting exposition, naming names, and dropping not-so-subtle hints at the film’s deeper meaning. Isaacs is a terrifically talented actor whose filmography is brimming with great work (see his work in the Harry Potter series to see how stellar he can be as a villain), and so it pains one to say that his performance here is plainly terrible. Every time he entered a scene, I let out an audible sigh because I knew if I didn’t open my ears wide and pay extreme close attention, I would miss out on the next necessary exposition and meta-symbolism dump.
For a villain in this eerie of a setting and with as much power as he’s given, he is completely devoid of any personality other than that of a discount Bela Lugosi Dracula impersonator. His performance, from beginning to end, is stiff, lifeless and a complete caricature of horror movie villain clichés.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Mia Goth playing Hannah, a life-long patient at the facility who knows nothing of her own past or of the outside world. She spends most of her days riding her bicycle around aimlessly, or dancing circles on rooftops and around bodies of water (but never going in them, as she makes an effort to point out). Her character is also ridiculous, but she’s the most interesting and well-acted of the bunch.
Many will remember Mia Goth mainly from Lars Von Trier’s controversial sex epic Nymphomaniac, in which she played a young adult with the playfulness and vulnerability of a young child. Her character here is very similar, though not to the graphic extent of the aforementioned Von Trier film. Whether it’s attributed to her voice, her look, or whatever else, Goth’s presence on the screen always seems to bring with it an automatic innocence – a sense that her character couldn’t ever harm anyone not because she doesn’t know how, but because she probably doesn’t even know what it means to do so. The characters in this film and how they relate to one another are mostly unbalanced mess, but she is the best of them and any scene she’s in is a highlight.
A Cure For Wellness is very long — too long, actually. It’s not that 146 minutes is long for a movie, just for this one. The first act in which Lockhart is sent to and eventually arrives at the wellness center is a slow-winding, atmospheric build-up that’s paced rather well and sets up the impending craziness quite effectively. The second act stumbles a bit by being mostly the same, but with little peeks at some of Verbinski’s crazy graphic inventions to grab our attention every few minutes.
This is well and good, but it doesn’t know when to stop. By the end of the film’s 29th act, there is so many story twists, so many reveals, and so many changes in pacing, mood, and setting that it becomes exhausting trying to keep up. Trying to list them all here individually, or even just shorthanding them, would make this review the length of a novella. In short, this film has more false endings then The Return of The King.
The film’s true finale is so ridiculous, though, it stretches the audience’s suspension of disbelief so far to the point where it becomes virtually becomes a cartoon.
Some clarification: For a lot of its runtime, A Cure For Wellness seems like a film without a purpose. The story is interesting enough, and as previously mentioned, Verbinski’s world-building is captivating in its luridness. But why? When the film cranks the craziness dial up to 11, as it does so often, at some point we ask ourselves, “Why was this made?” What point are Verbinski and Haythe trying to make? What does A Cure For Wellness have to say to its audience that will make them remember it aside from its imagery and graphic nature?
Turns out, not much. In the film’s bombastic over-the-top climax, the deep-rooted, yet also seemingly surface-level symbolism comes full circle. In a scene straight out of a classic 1940s monster movie, Jason Isaac’s character literally – yes, literally – rips the skin off his face to reveal he has in fact been a prominent historical figure involved in the creation of the facility the entire time, whose bloodline dates back centuries. I won’t spoil it further, but I’ll say this: It’s not a coincidence that the facility is located in Germany and looks like it was designed during the Second World War.
If you think that sounds stupid and unbelievable, you’re probably right. This is what I meant in my opening statement about tolerance for nonsense. At what point does it become so crazy that you clock out? For me, personally, it was this ending fiasco. That was the straw that broke my camel’s back. A torture device that requires the victim to be strapped down and placed in an incubator so live eels can be forced down their throat through a tube? Sure, I can believe that. A reanimated corpse that’s been living for several centuries wearing someone else’s skin on their face to appear normal? Fuck outta here.
To that, though, it would be unfair to not praise the film for its technical achievements. All these criticisms I have given surely make it sound like I hated this film, but that is not so. What the film lacks in story consistency and character development it makes up for in spades with its immaculate production design and costuming, vivid, expressive cinematography, and some truly excellent editing. In spite of everything else, this is one of the best looking films I’ve seen released by a major studio in quite a while. It’s certainly Verbinski’s best-looking film in a long time too. It came as no surprise to me to learn it was shot by Bojan Bazelli, who shot Verbinski’s The Ring back in 2002. In some ways, this movie is like a really long Ring tape.
Is A Cure For Wellness a bad film? No. Or at least I don’t think it is. It’s the kind of film one might describe as “solid.” It’s too long, the ending is ridiculous, and it doesn’t make total sense, but it looks spectacular, and I would be a dishonest critic if I didn’t say that in spite of all these criticisms, I had fun watching it. Call it a guilty pleasure, sure, but that kind of thing is all about tolerance, isn’t it?
