An American finds himself unable to leave a mysterious Swiss health
spa.
Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth, Celia
Imrie
There are two Gore Verbinskis. There's the director best known for
helming three installments of Pirates of the Caribbean, the very definition of a bloated franchise, and
big-budget turkey The Lone Ranger. And then there's the respected auteur behind smart smaller-scale
productions like Mousehunt, Rango and the US remake of The Ring. A Cure for Wellness, plays like a battle between the two Verbinskis; it displays the level of
craft we expect of the director at his best, but at a wholly unnecessary 146
minutes, it's the filmmaker at his most self-indulgent.
Loosely inspired by Thomas Mann's 1924 novel 'The Magic Mountain' (a copy of
which a character can be seen reading at one point in the film),
A Cure for Wellness follows young Manhattan broker Lockhart
(Dane DeHaan) as he travels to a remote Swiss health spa in an
attempt to convince his company's CEO, Pembroke (Harry Groener), to
return to New York and become a sacrificial lamb in a corporate
investigation.
There he finds a Jonestown type community overseen by Doctor Heinreich
Volmer (Jason Isaacs), a descendant of the mad baron who once ran the
castle and the town below. Breaking his leg in a car crash while attempting
to head to town for a phone call, Lockhart finds his attempts to leave the
facility, with or without Pembroke, thwarted by a seriously of increasingly
strange and disturbing turns.
Verbinski's influences might as well be graffitied all over the pristine
walls of his film's central clinic. This is a movie that knows it doesn't
have an original thought in its head, instead committing itself
whole-heartedly to paying homage to a mix of early twentieth century Central
European literature (along with Mann, there's much of Kafka to be found in
the bureaucracy of the spa) and mid-century horror cinema (Hammer and
Corman's Poe adaptations provide the visual inspiration). Anyone with a
passing familiarity with Gothic horror narratives will predict every plot
beat here, and won't be surprised when a curtain catches fire and family
secrets are exposed.
Despite such a lack of orginality, Verbinski's love of this genre is
infectious, and it's undeniably fun to watch him tick off its tropes. In
terms of pacing, the movie could easily shed 30 minutes, yet at the same
time its oppressive length almost becomes immersive, causing us to share
Lockhart's frustration at his inability to escape the facility. There are
scenarios that play out three times when once would have sufficed (there
isn't a corridor in the institute that Verbinski's camera doesn't slowly
track through at some point), but again this plays into the Kafkaesque
structure of the narrative. Add a sickly coloured production design and it
almost feels as if Verbinski is himself a mad doctor testing the boundaries
of his audience's patience. If you're willing to indulge his mad experiment,
you'll find much to admire, but like all good medicine,
A Cure for Wellness doesn't go down easy.
A Cure for Wellness is on Disney+ UK
now.
