A Cure for Wellness * (2016, Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth) – Movie Review

It is good to have a horror movie in the mainstream, good to provide stonking great star roles for the always welcome and talented Dane DeHaan and Jason Isaacs, and good to have a great looking movie. That’s the goods out of the way. The rest is bad, for this is not a good movie.

DeHaan plays Lockhart, a sickly looking ambitious young New York City executive sent to Switzerland to bring back his company’s CEO from a creepy wellness centre in the Alps. Of course he soon finds mad doctor Volmer’s spa treatments are deeply sinister. Volmer is a sick man, not dealing in wellness at all, assisted by his equally unpleasant Deputy Director (Adrian Schiller) and the local Constable (Peter Benedict). Poor old Celia Imrie is unflattering photographed as one of the old dears in the sanitarian, Victoria Watkins.

Director Gore Verbinski (mysteriously named ‘visionary director’ in the trailer) turns what would have made a fun, campy, deliciously silly 80-minute Seventies Hammer Horror movie into an overblown, pretentious, fabulous-looking two and a half hour art movie, accessing Stanley Kubrick, especially The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, as well as a bit of M Night Shyamalan.

Verbinski keeps saying to us: ‘look at my fabulous-looking movie, isn’t it fabulous-looking?’ But that doesn’t make a good movie. In fact, the more good-looking images and plush setting that get piled on, the worse and more boring the movie gets.

Just when you get really bored and want to go home, and the film seems finally to be winding down, it starts up all over again, in tawdry incestuous sexual assault stuff involving doctor Volmer and the film’s heroine, his daughter Hannah (London-born Mia Goth, 21 at the time of filming), intercut with the support cast dancing and eels threatening the hero. This is too much, in every sense, way too much. The final 20-minute reel sends you out of the cinema reeling.

It is rated for disturbing violent content and images, sexual content including an assault, graphic nudity, and strong language.

The story is by Verbinski and Justin Haythe, who is credited for the screenplay, which is full of stuff that is just about attempted shocks and scare not about making any sense at all. These are the guys to blame or praise, which ever you feel.

The Swiss-set film was shot over five months in Germany at the Castle Hohenzollern in Hechingen, which was closed to the public from July 13 – 24, 2015.

The breathtaking cinematography is by director of photography Bojan Bazelli. I should have added him to the short list of good things about the movie at the start. It looks as though it must have cost a lot of money – but it was a reasonably careful $40,000,000 – put this up against the $127,000,000 for Logan.

It is Verbinski’s first film since The Mexican (2001) where the score is not composed by Hans Zimmer – it is by Benjamin Wallfisch, and I can add him to the film’s plus account, as well as Eve Stewart for the handsome production design.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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