Review of A Cure for Wellness (2017) by Spangle — 06 Jun 2017

A Cure for Wellness was a film destined for disaster. A film set in a sanitarium dedicated to providing a "cure" to its wealthy patients, the film was immediately pinned as being a similar film to Shutter Island. With its mansion-setting that holds various secrets, a similar production design, and a protagonist running around reassuring everybody that he is not a patient, it is obvious why many critics and filmgoers drew the comparison. Yet, even if the film does try and hint towards this delusion at times, it is always a distraction for Lockhart (Dane DeHaan). It is not the truth. The audience knows it throughout and he knows it throughout. Instead, this is a film straight out of the late 1990s dressed up to be a psychological thriller set in a place with many dark secrets.

Using a horror film setup for its execution, the film is set on top of a hill in a small village in Switzerland. Introducing us to Lockhart, an ambitious and smarmy financial services salesman, the film shows him to be dispatched to the sanitarium to find his company's CEO who has disappeared to the sanitarium right before a big merger. Now, with rumors of the merger being in trouble, the stock price is tanking and the CEO needs to come back and sign off on the merger before there is nothing left to merge. Upon arriving, Lockhart quickly determines that this is a place with secrets. Filled to the brim with rich patients who left their lives of seeming luxury to find a cure to become well, the place is run by Dr. Heinreich Volmer (Jason Isaacs). Held there, along with the patients, is a "special case" named Hannah (Mia Goth). With classic horror film stories of a Baron who used to live in the mansion and similarly sought a cure for his sister/wife's infertility by running experiments on peasant villagers, only for the whole mansion and his sister/wife to be burned by the villagers, the film is immediately eerie and unsettling. Unrolling this information throughout, it becomes all the more apparent that this is still happening today for a very similar purpose.

The film draws comparisons to Shutter Island through this setup about a mysterious old mansion and through a line said by Lockhart's mother early on in the film. Handing him a new ballerina she has sculpted, she tells him that this ballerina is special and different from the others she has made. Compared to the others, this one's eyes are closed and is dreaming. This, as we quickly learn, is Hannah. Both are not just described as special, but both wear blue and are in a world where they are not aware of the fact that they are dreaming and deluded. With scenes of awful treatments and mysteries lying around every corner, director Gore Verbinski cultivates a classic asylum-esque feeling to the film that constantly keeps the audience on edge and uncertain as to what lies around the corner. These terrible experiments and the pain endured by Lockhart and others kept hostage in the sanitarium is unspeakable and why the film has earned a reputation for being entirely messed up. Yet, either it is not nearly as messed up as billed or my tastes in film are more messed up than previously imagined.

The film further distracts the audience with more parallels to Shutter Island that attempt to distract the viewer from realizing the truth behind the narrative. These distractions include instances where the doctors track down Lockhart and Hannah in the village and convince the similarly medicated police chief that Lockhart is delusional, scenes of "hallucinations" and dreams of eels everywhere, and Lockhart himself coming to believe he is delusional. Yet, the audience constantly knows better. Even when he begins to doubt his own mind, we saw him in the beginning as a regular guy in a financial services company tasked with coming to Switzerland. There should be no delusion here due to this fact, further underscoring how everything at the sanitarium is a massive cover-up, right? Yes and no. The sanitarium is both a terrifying and exploitative scam, but Lockhart is also delusional.

This is where the film breaks free and is why it is unfortunate for it to be nothing more than a Shutter Island rehash. Instead, it is far more apt to compare the film to the films of 1999 such as Fight Club, American Beauty, or Office Space. Perhaps, on the surface, this seems an odd comparison, but thematically it is the exact same film. Opening with a scene of a man named Morris working late at night and suffering a heart attack, Verbinski shows us shots of the man's family in a photo on the shelf. With him working late, it is clear that he is largely unable to spend much time with his family. Lockhart's own father, who also worked for the same financial services company that Lockhart now works for, took his own life after being ruined at work. Lockhart, until he goes to Switzerland, is always working. Those who use the sanitarium ran to go get the "cure" after feeling unfulfilled in their lives of work.