Some movies are good, some are bad,
others are just disappointing. A forgettable movie is more unforgivable than an
outright terrible one because if it leaves no impact and is discarded from your
memory a few hours after seeing it, then that's two hours of your life that
you'll never get back. But the most frustrating kind of disappointing movie to
me is the kind that has so much going for it, has the seed of a good or even
great movie buried deep within it just dying to break through the soil and
blossom, but is bogged down by one or two fatal flaws that hamstring the entire
experience. A Cure for Wellness, unfortunately, falls strictly into that
category.
Our story follows Lockhart (Dane
DeHaan), an ambitious young business executive whose boss mysteriously
disappears while on a trip to Switzerland, leaving a cryptic letter telling his
board of directors to not look for him. The company is about to go through a big
corporate merger and can't seal the deal without him, so our main character is
sent to find him and bring him back. His journey takes him to a castle in the
middle of the mountains that's been converted into a rehabilitation resort for
the elderly run by a scientist (Jason Isaacs) who claims to have found a “cure”
for all of life's ailments. After a car crash leaves him with a broken leg and
back at the resort as a patient, Lockhart starts investigating the castle's
dark history, has a few run-ins with a mysterious young girl (Mia Goth), and
tries to figutre out what's really going on with this miracle treatment. When
the scientists catch up to him, he is diagnosed with the same disease that
keeps all the patients longing for the cure, and fights to break out and expose
their secrets.
Let's start with the positives first
because there is a lot to like about this movie. For one, this is one of those
bug nutty, balls to the wall insane movies that we don't get a lot of anymore.
It's an old-school gothic horror/psychological thriller in the vein of the old
Hammer Studio and Italian horror movies from the 50's and 60's. But its not so
much about jump scares as it is about getting under the audience's skin (if you
have an aversion to slithery things like worms and eels or anything involving
teeth, avoid this movie like the plague) and letting your mind do all the
scaring for you with all the subtle implications before showing you what's
really going on. It's the cinematic equivalent of feeling something tickle your
body while blindfolded and then taking it off to find yourself covered in
cockroaches. The movie I kept thinking about while watching this was Shutter
Island, which was basically cut from the same cloth as Cure, with
its gothic aesthetic, cat and mouse mind games, secluded institution with
suspicious guests and even more suspicious staff, DeHaan even channels Leonardo
DiCaprio in his performance, except he seems to be more in Wolf of Wall
Street mode than The Departed mode. This is director Gore Verbinski,
a talented filmmaker who was saddled with managing the Pirates of the
Caribbean franchise for half a decade, returning to his roots, and this
feels like the kind of sick, depraved movie that's been ruminating in his mind
for all that time just begging to get out, and also conveniently doubles as a
way to make sure no one will want to direct another blockbuster franchise ever
again.
The film is also amazingly well
crafted. When it comes to mis en scene,
Verbinski is a virtuoso. The cinematography is appropriately muted and bleak,
the sets range from gorgeous views of the Swiss Alps to dank basements filled
with steampunk nightmare machines, the costumes are beautifully designed,
there's a lot of interesting camera work, and aside from one very fake looking
CGI deer, the special effects are actually quite good. This definitely comes
into play when the movie is trying to horrify you and sear some of its most
unforgettable images into your psyche. This is easily the most fucked up yet
beautifully put together film I've seen since The Neon Demon, except
they're operating on a much bigger scale than that. He also gets a lot of
mileage out of his actors, especially Jason Isaacs as the head scientist with
an eeirly pleasant bedside manner, and Mia Goth as this enigmatic young girl
living in the facility whose origins are intrinsically tied to the castle's
past. The only actor I couldn't really get behind was Dane DeHaan, but that's
mostly because he only has only one setting, that being a completely unlikable
douchebag. Sometimes that works in his favor like in Chronicle, here it
makes it hard to care about the horrible things he goes through.
Sadly, this is where my praise ends
because this movie has one very serious problem.
What ultimately kills the movie for me
is the pacing. This thing is two hours and twenty-six minutes long, and there's
a good forty minutes of it that could've easily been cut. For the first
forty-five minutes I was pretty well invested as all the pieces were being set
in place, but then it starts dragging its knuckles with a lot of pointless,
meandering exposition and scenes that ultimately go nowhere. The film finally
picks up steam in the third act, and that's where a good chunk of its most
horrifying moments come in, but by that time it had lost a lot of steam and my
interest was starting to wither fast. This is a problem that a lot of
Verbinski's movies have had in the past, in fact it's what killed the Pirates
sequels for me. (Or The World's End at least. I seem to be the only
person in the world who liked Dead Man's Chest.)
Another thing that kneecaps the
experience is the incoherent script. The film markets itself as this big puzzle
box. What is the cure that everyone talking about? Is the main character really
onto something or is he just losing his mind? And the answer that it has for us
is a big ol' resounding “I 'unno.” Eventually the film gets so lost in its own
digressions and self indulgence that it starts to forget its own bloody point
when the time comes for shit to hit the fan. Had it been shorter and better
paced, the ultimate payoff would've been way more satisfying, but by the end I
was left thinking “Wait, that's it?” And for a movie that's as shrouded in
mystery and has as much buil-up as this has, that is inexcusable.
Overall, A Cure for Wellness
is an ameteur Frankenstein's monster of a film. It's a horrifying, disgusting
monstrosity cobbled together from various pieces and you keep asking yourself
who would think of putting such a thing together let alone act on it, but those
pieces are poorly stitched together and look like they're about to fall apart
at any minute, and at the end of the day you just want to put the poor thing
out of its misery. What it has in style and originality it lacks in investment
and depth. Not every movie has to teach us a lesson or make some kind of grand
statement, but it should at least have a point. With a few minor changes, this
could've been a good movie, even a great one, but as it is, this is one
experiment that just didn't work.
5/10
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