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I keep misplacing the title of “A Cure for Wellness” and referring to it as “The Color of Despair,” which is more accurate. It’s a clumsy but accurate error.
According to director Gore Verbinski (“Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” “The Lone Ranger”), this film, which follows a New York financial wiz (Dane DeHaan) who becomes trapped in a creepy Swiss clinic, is an overstuffed horror epic. It’s a black-and-white film that’s been colorized. Pools of blackness and vast expanses of negative space are created by Bojan Bazelli’s stark photography. In addition to the use of ash, bone, eggshell, curdled cream, and shades of green ranging from bile to moss in Jenny Beavan’s retro-gothic costuming and production design, Eve Stewart also incorporates a lot of black. Imagine if you could cut open a David Fincher film and hang it upside down while bleeding it for two days. The result would look something like this. It’s an impressive fetish object in its own right.
However, as a fully satisfying feature-length drama, it is a complete failure. In addition, it’s questionable as a visionary spectacle because it’s too long and over-scaled, and its control of tone and theme never matches the attention to detail that has gone into its creation. Everything about “A Cure for Wellness” is a shame because there’s a lot to admire about the film.
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Lockhart, a corrupt young East Coast WASP who travels to Switzerland in search of a missing company executive, is played by DeHaan, who has the perfect look for the role. Lockhart ends up trapped at a “wellness clinic” run by a German-accented doctor named Heinrich Volmer (Jason Issacs). DeHaan has the appearance of Dylan Baker’s long-lost son, with his milky angularity and icy stares. He has that look that casting directors look for when they’re looking for prep school jerks or Nazi youths to cast in films. Lockhart is transformed into a punching-bag hero by the actor’s straightforward performance, which is alternately entitled, baffled, terrified, and ashamed. Lockhart is the kind of hero who exists primarily to suffer horribly before achieving enlightenment that looks a lot like comeuppance.
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Lockhart is insufferable at first because that is exactly what he should be. The miseries inflicted upon him are justified in part because he is a snotty capitalist porcupine who would otherwise grow up to be another Ebenezer Scrooge, and he is representing a system that produces Scrooges by the tens of thousands every year. It appears as though Verbinski and screenwriter Justin Haythe (“Revolutionary Road,” “The Lone Ranger”) are making a political statement about the vampire-like hold that the cultural memory of Europe still has over many wealthy and powerful Americans at times in their film. When Lockhart’s predecessor visited the clinic “to take in the waters,” as another character observes, “it was a very nineteenth-century thing to do,” and the all-white denizens of the place seem awestruck by the mere existence of Volmer, a handsome gadfly who has the chiseled looks of an old-school Gestapo officer but carries himself like an ambassador of reason, the film is a hit. The film is a hit. Because of the clinic’s resemblance to an identical building that burned down on this very spot decades ago, there is an elaborate backstory involving taboo hideousness, and there are recurring situations that revolve around insularity, hatred of outsiders, and the purity of one’s family’s bloodlines. (Mia Goth, who plays the doctor’s daughter, is the ultimate embodiment of the film’s anemic vision: she appears haunted and starved, yet she manages to look glamorous at the same time.)
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This is an excellent starting point for a social satire, and it also serves as an excellent thematic flavor for a compact, dreamy horror film of the same name. It is true that there are real ideas presented here, even good ideas, but they remain tantalizing but inadequately developed.
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In fact, it is only during the final half-hour, which features a slew of outrageous set pieces that I found hilarious but which many of my colleagues found trashy and excessive, that “A Cure for Wellness” achieves the level of bug-nuts craziness that it may have required all along. Though he’s competent at psychological and atmospheric horror, Verbinski is often at his most inventive when he’s letting it all hang out in sequences of clockwork suspense and ridiculous action. This is why the slapstick sequences in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, the chases in “Rango,” and the final 45 minutes of “The Lone Ranger” represent Verbinski at his most Verbinskian. A Cure for Wellness finally begins to draw the kinds of connections (through sheer excess) that give it a distinct personality in the final half-hour, such as a cut from a decadent, repulsive character whirling in circles after sustaining an injury to a group of clueless rich folk dancing in a grand ballroom, which is perhaps narratively unnecessary.
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Furthermore, the two and a half hour running time is excessive even by the standards of excessiveness. Since silent films like German Expressionist films and 1930s Universal horror films were known for being short and lean, it is ironic and regrettable that the film takes so much of its aesthetic cues from those films. Very long horror films, no matter how skillfully the filmmakers maintain a mood, often reach a point of diminishing returns—”The Shining” is a rare exception, though even that film has its detractors—because they give you time to think about the concept and fixate on plot holes, judgment errors, and other imperfections.
Despite the fact that he comes close to being Stanley Kubrick at times, Verbinski is no Stanley Kubrick. In addition, there are sequences involving eels that make eels appear even creepier than they already did, as well as an example of dentistry used as torture that makes the scene in “Marathon Man” look like a routine cleaning. The film “A Cure for Wellness” could easily be remade as a version that is all suggestion and understatement, as well as one that is essentially the madcap finale played out over the course of a feature film, climbing to nosebleed heights of bad taste and waving a freak flag at the summit. The alternative, a rag-and-bone shop of miscellaneous items, would have been preferable to what ended up onscreen.
Most conspicuously absent is Kubrick’s lordly, even naughty sense of humour, which is conspicuously present in his other films. It attempts black comedy on a number of occasions, but rarely achieves anything more sophisticated than the sick joke comic rhythm of, “What’s the worst thing that could happen to this character?” followed by, “Here it comes.” Lockhart’s agony becomes numb as a result of repeated exposure. In the process, he keeps coming up against the same realizations, only to be lied to or misdirected and find himself right back where he started. If you show too much of this type of thing, even the most patient viewers will throw their hands up and exclaim, “Oh, come on.”
For more personality quizzes check this: Rock Dog Quiz.
