A Cure for Wellness (2017)

Review

146min

Genre:     Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Director:  Gore Verbinski

Cast:       Dane DeHaan, Mia Goth, Jason Isaacs…and more

Writers:   Justin Haythe and Gore Verbinski

-Synopsis-

On a mission to retrieve his boss from a stay at an isolated ‘wellness centre’; an ambitious young executive begins to suspect all is not as it seems as this mysterious retreat starts to reveal its troubling secrets, leaving him in a struggle to break free of the alluring shackles which keep the guests at this bizarre spa in this psychological horror/thriller from the director of ‘The Ring’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl’.

After a career spent directing everything from huge blockbusters like the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ series and 2013’s ‘The Lone Ranger’, to the 2011 animation ‘Rango’ and the Hollywood remake of ‘The Ring’, cinematic stylist Gore Verbinski co-writes and directs a contemporary mystery built on the foundations of classic Gothic horror, in this unsettling and stylish thriller with much to say about modern life and how we live it.

Dane DeHaan (The Place Beyond the Pines, The Amazing Spider-Man 2) stars as driven young finance high-flyer ‘Lockhart’, sent to a picturesque and seemingly idyllic isolated retreat in German-speaking Alpine Switzerland, to retrieve his company’s CEO after receiving a cryptic and troubling letter from him. But when an accident effectively renders him a patient in this sanatorium for the old and wealthy, his fellow patients which include mysterious young girl ‘Hannah’ (Mia Goth) and the facility’s enigmatic leader ‘Dr. Volmer’ (Jason Isaacs), unwittingly begin to reveal disturbing secrets about the retreat’s history and the ‘cure’ it offers, as a dark and tense mystery stylishly unravels.

If there’s one thing you can probably count on from a Gore Verbinski movie it’s that it will look the part, and ‘A Cure for Wellness’ is no exception; combining some arresting cinematography by Bojan Bazelli with top-notch production design to create a 19th century aesthetic within the modern world, augmenting one of the film’s core themes of returning people to a simpler time and freeing them from the pressures of the present. And the film’s vivid sights conspire with a multi-tonal score by Benjamin Wallfisch, which combines classical and electronic sounds to create an atmosphere that’s simultaneously alluring and foreboding, for both ‘Lockhart’ and the audience.

‘A Cure for Wellness’ is essentially a stylish psychological thriller featuring characters with troubling pasts within an intertwining narrative, which builds with tension and becomes macabre before eventually unfolding into a traditional horror with elements of cultism and institutionalisation, and which clearly takes inspiration from films like ‘The Wicker Man’, ‘Shutter Island’ and even ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’.  The film also has something to say about the spiritual perversion brought about by capitalism and the dangers of unfettered professional ambition when it comes to a work/life balance, as well as the hypochondriacal and substance-dependent society we’ve become in the West.

But despite an intriguing premise and some early promise, ‘A Cure for Wellness’ is a prime example of a mystery which becomes less interesting as it unravels, and a thriller without enough genuine thrills to make it gripping throughout an overly long runtime, with at least 30 minutes of fat to trim from a bloated story which doesn’t  build enough tension to justify its deliberate pace. Nor is this a particularly shocking horror with any real edge, apart from one excruciating dental scene, and aside from some full-frontal elderly nudity it doesn’t do enough to justify its 18 rating.

The three lead actors do their best with the material they have and manage to bring some elegance to their roles, if not real depth. But the characters aren’t interesting or developed enough for the audience to care what happens to them, within a narrative which almost borders on being dull, before concluding in grandiose but predictable style with a clichéd horror movie reveal which leaves a disappointingly bitter taste in the mouth.

We must give praise to Verbinski and the studios for returning a visual beauty and dreamlike (or nightmare) quality to a genre now dominated by low-budget brutal realism, the way that Guillermo del Toro did with 2015’s stunning ‘Crimson Peak’. But its stylistic virtues and expert craftsmanship can’t quite keep ‘A Cure for Wellness’ from being a disappointment in virtually every genre and sub-genre it straddles.

The Bottom Line…

Despite being an atmospheric and impressively stylish psychological mystery/thriller and pseudo Gothic horror, ‘A Cure for Wellness’ is fatally hampered by uncompelling characters, a sluggish pace and narrative decisions which squander some real potential, ultimately making for a well-crafted and watchable but underwhelming and forgettable cinematic experience.

Similar films you may like (Home Video)

Shutter Island (2010)

Two 1950s US Marshals are sent to investigate a disappearance of an escaped inmate at an isolated institution for the criminally insane, only to get caught up in a dark conspiracy where nothing is as it seems in Martin Scorsese’s psychological thriller/mystery adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel.

Directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley among others.

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