A Cure for
Wellness
Dir: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth, Harry Groener, Celia
Imrie, and Ivo Nandi
Director Gore Verbinski has crafted quite an interesting
career. After striking genre gold with the remake of the Japanese horror film
“Ringu”, orchestrating one of Disney’s most successful franchises with “Pirates
of the Caribbean”, and continuing collaboration with Johnny Depp on the
animated film “Rango” and the reboot of “The Lone Ranger, it seems like Mr.
Verbinski is poised to do whatever he wants to do with his next film. It
doesn’t take long to realize this quality in the director’s new film “A Cure
for Wellness”.
For nearly two and a half hours Mr. Verbinski compiles a
beautiful, confounding, and chaotic medley of his favorite and most influential
film scenes recreated. One moment you are whisked away on a train ride through
the Swiss Alps in a moment of stunning scenery, the next you are offered images
of unnerving and repulsive situations. It’s undeniable that Mr. Verbinski and
director of photography Bojan Bazelli can find the beauty in any situation. Unfortunately
coherence doesn’t seem high on the priority list.
Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) is an ambitious and arrogant young
executive who is moving his way up the business ladder, however he is
blindsided by the higher-ups and tasked with going to a reclusive “wellness
center” to bring back the CEO who left under suspicious circumstances. Upon
arrival Lockhart finds himself at odds with the doctor of the facility, a
charming man named Volmer (Jason Isaacs), until an accident has him admitted as
a patient. Lockhart very quickly realizes that there is something very
mysterious about the “wellness center”, which leads an investigation to
discover the many secrets that lie within the walls of the facility.
Aside from this basic overview, the plot doesn’t make much
of a difference. Mr. Verbinski never seems too concerned with providing any
kind of answer to the bizarre and sometimes completely outlandish happenings in
the film. Instead it’s the questions, mostly proposed through strange visuals,
which pose the primary focus for the director. To this extent the director
achieves a rich and striking palette of oddities; gothic beauty reminiscent of
the Hammer Horror age with the gray and blue colored world seen in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men”. Thematically the film
feels like a “greatest hits” of influences; “The Abominable Dr. Phibes”,
“Phantom of the Opera”, and “Dracula” are a just a few of the older references
while Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” seems to be the most pertinent newer one. Most interesting are the intersections with the style
and tone of Roman Polanski’s darker visions.
Still, these pieces of influence don’t play much of a bigger
role than making the film interesting to look at. While there are moments that suggest
better narrative angles, specifically about societal concerns related to
isolation and illness, they are never completely realized. Dane DeHaan’s lead
character Lockhart, who is unlikable throughout the majority of the film,
doesn’t help the narrative. While you may root for him as a detective
unraveling a mystery, you may also not care when bad things happen to him. And
bad things happen, disturbing and cringe-worthy things. Mr. Verbinski goes for
shock in numerous horror scenarios; giant eels, bodies afloat in tanks, gore,
and one scene, not to be spoiled, that will tap directly into a nightmare many
people have.
The picturesque quality of “A Cure For Wellness” sustains
much of the engagement but the narrative leaps into so many different places by
the midway point, with a final act that completely devours any semblance of
structure established before it, the film never quite recovers. However, credit
to Mr. Verbinski for bringing what seems like an uncompromised nightmare to
life.
Monte’s Rating
3.00 out of 5.00
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