Review of A Cure for Wellness (2017) by Matt C — 20 Feb 2017

I have no aversion to weirdness. If anything, I'm predisposed to like weirdness, but weirdness has to be seated within something else. It has to be grounded within its own reality or else it just feels like a mess, and that isn't what happened with A Cure for Wellness.

With an appealing look to it and great production design, the inherent immersive nature of what's onscreen carries the movie on its shoulders, but it can only do that for so long. It's a decently entertaining movie but not for the reasons intended, with a script that grows from peripheral to bad to terrible throughout the film, with an undercooked mythology, weak characters, and revelations that make the movie a clusterfuck.

A movie's visuals should exist to service the script, not the other way around. When a man working for a company in New York City has a bizarre heart attack and dies, Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) takes his position.

He's then sent by his bosses to retrieve Roland Pembroke (Harry Groener), the company's CEO, from a wellness center in the Swiss Alps. After he arrives and the staff denies him the ability to take Pembroke back, Lockhart gets into a car accident and has a broken leg, causing him to stay at the center.

He's introduced to the austere Dr. Heinreich Volmer (Jason Isaacs) who runs the center and meets an awkward and stilted teenage girl named Hannah (Mia Goth), and during his stay, he begins to uncover some messed up stuff that the staff is doing to their patients.

(Screenwriter Justin Haythe based some of their doings off of the pursuits of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, so that's the kind of stuff that you'll be seeing later on.) It sounds like a cool idea with a decent Crimson Peak-esque thriller in there somewhere, but it never really gets out there.

The most--and some might say only--consistent part of the movie is its aesthetics. The interiors are symmetrical and spotless, and the exteriors look like something out of a resort advertisement as shot by David Fincher.

The sound design is well done and amplifies the atmosphere of the locations, and the cinematography from Bojan Bazelli is of similar quality, and Gore Verbinski's direction makes it clear that he can get some interesting shots of minimalistic and sometimes banal rooms.

The performances are fine for the most part, but they're a bit hard to judge because the movie has a surrealism to the way in which people speak that seems a little inconsistent at times. Mia Goth lends a lot to her character with her physicality and softness that makes an underwritten character more interesting to watch.

Speaking of the script, it is, as mentioned earlier, largely the root of this movie's pervasive issues. We don't learn a ton about our protagonist beyond some brief flashbacks about his father, the rationale for having him even go to this Swiss wellness center feels like a MacGuffin, and as the story unfolds, it gives a strong feeling that Haythe--and Verbinski, who shares a story credit with him--made it up as they went along.

It isn't that the screenplay lost me, because it would have actually had me. The way in which it's told seems to mistake mysterious and aloof for underdeveloped and sketchy, so it felt like a way to stitch together visuals instead of convey a progression of emotions, and keep in mind that this is coming from a person whose favorite movie is Under the Skin and whose favorite movie of 2016 was The Neon Demon.

With A Cure for Wellness, however, the story only exists to provide some striking and sometimes shock-based visuals. The movie starts to meander around the halfway point in a sequence involving DeHaan and Goth's characters going to a bar, and it's confusing as to whether or not Verbinski was trying to inject some dark humor into the movie or was just unable to make the weirdness of it all seem earned.

People in my theater were laughing a lot, and I don't think they were supposed to. People were also checking their phones for time and one man after the movie mentioned that he fell asleep, and I must say that the movie's 146-minute runtime wasn't necessary, especially given how aimless some aspects of the screenplay were.

Personally speaking, I wasn't bored because the movie got so batshit that I was at least entertained by its messiness, but I wasn't engaged for the reasons that the movie wanted me to be, and that's a problem.

One scene has a character tied down by metal restraints and surrounded by five men, but then the character is shown having escaped a few seconds later with no explanation. Again, the movie is a mess. A Cure for Wellness doesn't really seem to know what it's doing.

The movie finds itself in increasingly bizarre and ridiculous situations without the ability to ground it within its own mythos, and when character motivations are revealed, they either feel incomplete, contrived, or excessive.

It's kind of impressive for a movie to maintain my interest for almost two and a half hours especially when it isn't good, but strong production and set design and a fitting visual style combined with a mess of a script doesn't maintain my interest in the intended ways.

I'm happy that a major studio nowadays gave a movie like this a $40 million production budget, but it's unfortunate that the final result was this. 4.5/10, pretty bad, C-, definitely below average, etc.