Eeling the Blues
By Dwayne Tillman
There’s been an unfortunate trend of late of massive blockbusters being squandered by major studios (looking at you Warner Bros.) compromising their directors’ visions for something more mechanically constructed. So much so that said films come across more as Cliff Notes summaries of corporate studio meetings rather than a piece of memorable cinema that will be revered for years to come. So the fact that A Cure For Wellness, surely one of the weirdest, most audacious studio films to grace our screens in recent memory, brings along with it an incredible artistic vision by director Gore Verbinski and ambition is worth a recommendation alone.
Wellness follows Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), a young, ambitious Wall Street executive who, after an attempt at screwing over his bosses, is sent to a fancy wellness sanitarium in the Swiss Alps to retrieve his company’s CEO, who has apparently lost his mind. Once there, Lockhart quickly realises that not all is what it seems at this place. He meets Jason Isaacs’ Dr Volmer, the polite but sinister head of the sanitarium, who, as Lockhart before too long discovers, has some questionable methods of ‘purifying’ his patients. And so begins a weird and wild journey of mysterious young women, haunting corridors and eels. Think Shutter Island meets The Shining meets a 50’s style B-grade horror film.
The first thing you should keep in mind when going into A Cure For Wellness is that this movie is loooooong. It’s 146 minutes, and it feels it. Having said that, I can’t say I was ever bored watching it. While it overstays its welcome by about 30 minutes, the film is paced well enough that you feel completely drawn into its world and ensures that its horror elements feel earned and impactful without resulting to using cheap thrills or jump scares. It’s quite impressive on Verbinski’s part that for the majority of the film, he is able to achieve a decent sense of coherence not through narrative, but through mood and tone. Wellness is a film that works a lot better when you try not to make sense of the (admittedly messy) plot and just let it take you along with it through the use of its atmosphere and its constant sense of foreboding dread. I’d assume that most viewers wouldn’t have the patience for this, but it’s good fun sitting back and watching the insanity unfold in front of you.
Technically, this is one seriously impressive film. Verbinski, with his other films like The Ring and even his Pirates of the Caribbean films, has always had a knack creating haunting and gob-smackingly beautiful images to be seared onto our retinas. A Cure For Wellness might just be his most impressive yet in that department. Bojan Bazelli’s lush cinematography ensures that almost every image is one you could freeze and hang on your wall, which makes for a nice juxtaposition for general grotesqueness on display in the rest of the film. In addition, its production design is stunning whilst also keeping the sense of dread pulsing throughout the film.
It’s a shame, then that the third act almost completely squanders all the good work done by the rest of the film. Seemingly a victim of reshoots, the climax requires us to take our suspension of disbelief a step too far, feeling like it’s been pulled out of nowhere. After all of the hard work we’ve put into the previous two hours, it’s hard not to feel a little cheated by the final payoff. Not to mention the fact that a lot of its revelations are kinda predictable and basically revealing things that most of us figured out an hour ago.
There are other misgivings, too. For such an endurance test of a running time, I felt the characters were significantly underwritten. Dane DeHaan brings his typically compelling intensity to a character that isn’t given much to do and needed much more of a relationship with the audience. A lot of the reveals in the latter part of the film (in addition to being pretty predictable) lacked a decent impact, and this results in you not feeling much towards this character. Same goes for Jason Isaacs’ villain, whose motivations are not nearly as interesting as they could have been.
A Cure For Wellness can never really decide on what it wants to be. Is it a psychological thriller about madness? A parable about ageing? A commentary on the modern American work ethic? All of these things are here, but none of those are really developed on enough. As a result, it prevents the film from becoming something truly memorable.
It’s understandable that this film didn’t connect with audiences in America (and probably won’t here). It’s too long, too weird, too artistic. But there’s fun to be had here, and it’s something I can see becoming a cult hit one day. It’s a decent Friday night flick for those out there after something different. And in a marketplace where every second week there’s yet another needless or unnecessary sequel, it’s incredibly refreshing to sit back and let a film take you on a weird, demented journey, even if it doesn’t always hit its ambitious targets. On that level, I’d recommend this Cure.