A horror mystery that just isn’t very scary.
It’s one of the strange coincidences this year that just two weeks after Rings hits theaters, the franchise’s original director, Gore Verbinski, will see the release of his long-awaited return to the horror genre with A Cure for Wellness. A psychological horror film about a man slowly losing his mind inside of a labyrinthian sanitarium, the marketing and promotional materials for A Cure for Wellness have been almost entirely composed of vague, unusual images and music meant to lure viewers into seeing the whole film - in the hopes of learning the startling truth behind those scenes.
But there’s a danger to setting up those kinds of expectations, and while A Cure for Wellness proves to be another able-bodied vehicle for Verbinski to show off his visual prowess, viewers will almost undoubtedly find themselves disappointed in how the film answers their questions. Ambitious and dreamlike from its opening frames to the very end, A Cure for Wellness talks a lot about curing the human condition, seemingly unaware of the problems it itself suffers from.
Dane DeHaan leads the film as Lockhart, an ambitious young financial executive who is sent by his bosses to retrieve the company’s CEO from a remote “wellness center” located high up in the Swiss Alps. Once he arrives, Lockhart soon winds up trapped there, and begins to wonder if the spa’s healing methods are actually what they seem, as he learns more about the building’s medieval origins and experiences more troubling “visions” while undergoing the institute’s treatments. Filling out the rest of the main cast is Jason Isaacs as the institute’s mysterious leader, Dr. Volmer, and Mia Goth as the beautiful and “special” Hannah, who spends most of her days singing and walking around the institute by herself, eventually catching Lockhart’s eye.
It’s a basic premise, and one that audiences have no doubt seen before, taking inspiration from cinematic greats like David Cronenberg (especially in its body horror elements) or John Carpenter along the way. At times, it even seems reminiscent of The Shining in how it incorporates the institute’s history into its present day story, with Verbinski trying to evoke the same unpredictable nature with the center’s long and twisting corridors that Kubrick did with The Overlook. But if A Cure for Wellness is truly trying to emulate The Shining, it suffers from far too much buildup and hype for its own good. It’s like if Kubrick kept only showing the twin girls at the end of the hallway for two hours, before suddenly cutting to the final showdown between Jack, Danny, and Wendy, rather than ever showing the woman in room 237 or the hallway of blood.
That’s not to say that A Cure for Wellness doesn’t offer a variety of different scares. Instead, it just isn’t ever able to successfully build up the intensity or stakes it needs to truly be effective. Throughout nearly the entire film, the same set of events happen over and over again to a nauseating degree, with little to no consequences: Lockhart explores the center, discovers a shocking new truth about it or experiences a terrifying vision, is put back in his room by Volmer, and then sneaks out the next night. Each time he discovers something new about the center, he tries to tell someone to no avail, and doesn’t ever consider just leaving and coming back with help, even despite being fully able to leave the center if he so chooses. He’s quite possibly one of the more clueless horror movie characters to come along in recent years.
Luckily, DeHaan’s simultaneously arrogant and likeable performance as the character makes Lockhart’s stupidity significantly more bearable, but eventually his mistakes become unforgivable the further into the film’s ungodly, almost 2 and half-hour run time you get. DeHaan really doesn’t get much to do as the character either, often times playing a cat and mouse game with Isaacs, who gets to have more fun playing Volmer than any other actor in the film does. He approaches the character with a certain gentle quality that makes it hard to sometimes predict just how bad he could actually be, even when the film’s dialogue and Verbinski’s camera placement seem intent on hitting you over the head with a sledgehammer about how evil he is.
To their credit, Verbinski and writer Justin Haythe clearly have something to say in A Cure for Wellness, most of which seems to be directed at the poisonous ambition and arrogance often found in corporate America. There’s an equally intriguing point the film makes about society’s constant desire to improve itself, though, and at multiple times in the film the center’s patients talk about trying to find The Cure, without ever explicitly stating what The Cure even is in the first place. Is there really something wrong with the human condition? Or is what’s wrong the nagging belief we all share that there simply must be?
Verbinski and Haythe don’t offer up an answer to any of those questions, often opting to just try and elicit that same gnawing feeling in the form of some disturbing imagery, like a woman in a bathtub covered in snakes, a spa shower with no exits, or a toilet handle that constantly rattles in the middle of the night. Most of these sequences land to unnerving effect in the beginning of the film, only to wind up feeling repetitious as time goes on.
There’s really no need for A Cure for Wellness to be as long as it is. The filmmakers have stretched out their story for all that it’s worth here, and like many modern, successful horror films, Cure for Wellness attempts to mix the horror and mystery genres together. Yet, unlike It Follows, The Witch, or The Anatomy of Jane Doe, the film takes on more than it can handle, raising too many questions for its own good, with answers that any viewer who’s watched enough movies before should be able to see coming by the end of the film’s opening act. For a film about the toxicity of ambition, A Cure for Wellness doesn’t seem willing to take the time to heed the warnings of its victims.
The Verdict
A Cure for Wellness feels confused and unsatisfying in the face of its own challenging questions and themes, even despite the film’s thought-provoking imagery and fine performances.
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