‘A CURE FOR WELLNESS’ feels familiar, while managing to be unlike anything you’ve ever seen
Gore Verbinski’s gorgeous new horror film stumbles a bit, but it’s a worthwhile journey
A Cure For Wellness, in theaters this weekend, is not a movie for everybody. It’s going to make people upset. It’s going to make people angry. It’s going to offend people. It’s going to scare people, and confuse people, and, inevitably, some people are going to tell you that they were just so damn bored. After all, it’s a horror movie where nearly nothing “scary” happens for the first hour or more, and it ultimately stretches to a gargantuan runtime of 2 hours and 26 minutes. There will be people who try to insist that this isn’t a horror movie, and they will try to force it into a “thriller” category. Genre-policing is dumb, but those people are wrong.
Because, I fundamentally disagree that the primary aim of horror is to “scare.” I think the best horror does more than just make you jump. I think the best horror gives us permission to explore something dark and unsettling in the human condition, some deep desire to gaze into the unfathomable abyss and discover how it gazes back at us. Horror doesn’t just frighten. It disturbs, and it disturbs not only us but the social order around us. What happens when everything we think we know falls to pieces? What happens when we fall to pieces?
That’s the territory A Cure for Wellness explores. The film doesn’t just want to make you cringe, or jump, or scream in shock, although it does do that. It’s also asking you to confront something else, some emotion less easily put into words. This is a movie about standing at the edge of a yawning chasm of insanity, then leaning over the cliff to peer into the darkness below, hoping you don’t lose your balance. It’s about how we keep the tiniest hold on our humanity, when everything is conspiring to strip it away.
And it does it by putting a million familiar horror tropes in a blender set to puree, and using the resulting mixture as just one ingredient in something that somehow feels new. Have I mentioned that it’s gorgeous to look at, from the first frame to the last?
The film stars Dane DeHaan as Lockhart, a smarmy finance bro who thinks the world will bend to his will just because he’s made a fortune at a young age. He’s tough to root for at first, but DeHaan does an excellent job peeling back the character’s layers. When the company CEO sends home a mysterious letter indicating that he is “not a well man,” the board of executives sends Lockhart to the Swiss Alps to bring him back from the wellness spa he’s escaped to. When he arrives to the castle on the mountain, Lockhart discovers that the spa isn’t a spa so much as a sanitarium. An unfortunate accident soon necessitates that Lockhart stay at the wellness spa longer, even though he’s eager to get back to the comfortable sterility of New York, with its uniform, impersonal office buildings looming over the camera like a row of monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Lockhart soon discovers that all is not what it seems at the spa. Everyone seems obsessed with drinking the water; the spring under the spa apparently has healing powers. But what, exactly, is everyone healing from? What’s making them sick? And why do they seem to be getting sicker? Is the sanitarium’s scientist proprietor, Dr. Volmer (Jason Isaacs), as selfless as he appears, or there menace lurking behind his eyes? (Do I even have to ask?) And what does all of this have to do with a pretty young girl Lockhart has spotted around the sanitarium grounds?
The film has been promoting itself into my twitter timeline recently with the following tweet, which compares the film to The Shining.
It’s an apt comparison; there’s hardly been a horror film since The Shining as interested in storytelling through visuals as A Cure for Wellness is. This film is gorgeous. Verbinski’s camera is interested in symmetry, and broken symmetry. It likes repeating patterns. There are spirals and jagged lines and swirling curtains and elaborate costumes. There are shockingly beautiful colors against drab backgrounds. There are scenes set at night lit with lush, melodramatic lighting. In short, it’s a visual treat the way the films of Stanley Kubrick often are.
It’s like The Shining in other ways, too. Both films are about a slow slide into insanity. Both films have as their setting a grandiose, stately building in the mountains. Both buildings have what appear to be impossible, ever-changing layouts. Both films deal with isolation, with someone closing themselves off from the modern world, intentionally at first and then against their will. There are even black and white photos of crowds from a previous era of the sanitarium’s history hanging on the wall, and we soon learn that not everyone pictured is necessarily dead.
Verbinski is practically on-screen himself, begging for the comparison. Other Kubrick references pop up, including but not limited to a visceral body-horror scene that draws clear inspiration from A Clockwork Orange.
But A Cure For Wellness finds inspiration in more than Kubrick. There are shades of James Whale’s classics Universal horror films like Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. The “man tries to uncover mysteries at an asylum by piecing together clues from the inmates” plot drew a lot of early comparisons to Martin Scorcese’s Shutter Island. The film’s obsession with eyes feels Hitchcockian. Scenes heavily featured in the marketing that show Lockhart discovering wrinkly bodies suspended in water tanks could have been taken from about 97% of Wachowski movies. Verbinski shoots two characters excitedly riding one bicycle down a winding mountain road just like Spielberg would have. (What is it about young people riding bicycles that feels so Spielbergian?)
Gore Verbinski has shown impressive versatility throughout his career; he’s as able to turn in solidly scary J-horror remakes like The Ring as he is to produce family-friendly fare like the animated Rango or the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Here, Verbinski shows off his impressive grasp of cinematic horror history, effortlessly mixing together various subgenres like body horror, psychological horror, and monster horror, among others. A Cure for Wellness is at once metaphysical, scientific, fantastical, mythic, and about the cruelty of everyday men. Even the villain working behind the scenes of the sanitarium turns out to be one part vampire, one part mad scientist, a dash of ghoul, and a pinch of some unknowable, Lovecraftian Other. The cumulative effect is monumentally impressive, a film experience that feels at once familiar and yet wholly original.
Events in A Cure for Wellness have a curious way of repeating themselves in new iterations, the film’s symphony of horror progressing in movements or cycles more than it is broken out into traditional “acts.” The film ebbs and flows along with Lockhart’s sanity, just like the town cabbie who drives rich people up and down the mountain. We watch, helpless, as Lockhart comes close to uncovering some horrific truth about the sanitarium, then lapses back into blissed-out ignorance… until something else sets him down a new path of discovery, tracing out the edges of some other piece of the puzzle… until he’s lulled back into a false sense of security… until...
It’s the film’s final movement that will undoubtedly alienate some audiences while solidifying its status as a cult masterpiece for others. Without spoiling the ending, suffice it to say that the film’s climax is deeply, deeply disturbing in a way many people will no doubt find crass and offensive, and I don’t disagree. After the film’s slow beginning, the end is an overwhelming cacophony of horror, injustice piled on top of indignity, invasion mixed with assault. The psychological horror spills over into the physical, and I completely understand finding the end too brutal given what’s come before. Verbinski could have dialed it back just a bit, and filmed some things in a slightly different way, to keep the impact of the end without veering over the edge into offensive schlock.
But: it’s a gonzo, balls-to-the-wall finale, one few films would ever even consider trying to pull off. That’s not justification in and of itself, but it’s something.
Here’s another tweet the studio keeps pushing in my Twitter timeline:
That’s not quite true. A Cure for Wellness is like a lot of things I’ve seen before. But I’ve never seen those things executed all at the same time, in quite such a manic, bizarre, insane, ambitious, gorgeous fashion. Even if the end is an offensive misstep, above all else, A Cure For Wellness is a film that adds up to more than the sum of its many, many parts.
