A Cure for Wellness

2017 horror mystery

Rating: 12/20

Plot: An aspiring executive is sent to a wellness center in the Swiss Alps to retrieve the company's big boss. It's a mysteriously difficult challenge, and it's made even more difficult when he becomes a patient as well.

I enjoy Gore Verbinski movies--the underappreciated Mousehunt, the unfairly-maligned The Lone Ranger, the underrated Rango, at least the first Pirates movie--so I looked forward to this weirdo horror movie. Things start out well enough, intriguing with the flashy visuals and an awe-inspiring locale that is shot mysteriously. The vibe is haunting, and the naked elderly people Verbinski allows us to get a glimpse of only got me more excited. The film had a quiet energy, and Verbinski's cinematic magic tricks kept things interesting for the first half of the movie. I even liked the countless shots that I would call completely pointless--a camera angle from the side of a train, a magnified mother's eye, a reflection in a deer trophy eyeball.

That quiet energy couldn't be maintained, however, and this movie just got sillier and sillier as it went on. The main problem might be that it's simply too long. At 2 1/2 hours, this got to be a bit of an endurance test. Impressionistic flashbacks, a protagonist who was a little flat, visual redundancy, loads of unanswered questions. It just got to be a little too much.

Dane DeHaan plays the main character, a sort of straight man in a befuddling world. He's got the type of face that makes him difficult to root for, but there's also nothing redeeming about his character as a human being to make an audience want to root for the guy. He seemed like he could be an illegitimate Trump son, and that's never a good thing. The other characters kind of succeed in being part of the strange background, but it was difficult to connect with any of them either.

Although the hospital's intentions and the conflict are all tidied up eventually, I wasn't completely satisfied. All these symbols--the water, most obviously; ballerinas; eels; deer; teeth--seemed obvious enough but failed to add up to anything significant. And Verbinski and screenwriter Justin Haythe seemed like they wanted to say something about the 1%, about capitalism and greed, or about something that would make Bernie Sanders a fan of the movie, but they frustratingly never got there.

A movie like this can't succeed on its impressive visuals alone. As you'd expect from a Verbinski movie, this is a really pretty movie, and some of the imagery, since it's a horror film, are successfully creepy and capable of lingering in the nightmares. But the length, the lack of engaging characters, and the ultimate emptiness of the whole thing keep it from being anything I'd ever care to see again.

Oh, and The Weather Man! Another really good Gore Verbinski movie.