A Cure for Wellness hit Blu-ray and DVD this week, and it may be the single best-looking Blu-ray I have ever seen. Director Gore Verbinski is one of the unsung masters of modern cinema, and each and every frame of Wellness is composed with painterly craft. Along with composer Benjamin Wallfisch and Bojan Bazelli (who this past year captured actual magic with Pete’s Dragon), Verbinski has built a haunted house that all but thrums with menace. From a purely technical standpoint, Wellness can only be called astonishing.
The problem is, well, the rest of it.
But first, the plot! When the CEO of a major financial services firm disappears into a remote Swiss mountain health spa on the eve of a major merger, his partners coerce young corporate climber Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) to travel to the spa and bring him back. But what should have been a quick errand becomes more complicated when Lockhart is injured and forced to stay at the clinic himself, where he promptly begins poking into areas he shouldn’t and attracting the attention of the clinic’s leader Dr. Volmer (Jason Isaacs) and Volmer’s ward, Hannah (Mia Goth).
The clinic is built on the site of an ancient castle where terrible deeds occurred, so you know how this game is played: steady escalation of creepy events, visions, paranoia, a secret history that’s gradually unearthed, etc., etc. To its credit, Wellness never tries to play this material as particularly innovative. Indeed, like fellow neo-Gothics Crimson Peak and Shutter Island, a lot of the fun comes from the filmmakers’ awareness that modern viewers already know this genre inside and out, and willfully tweak those expectations.
But the problem is that Wellness can’t commit to just being a canny bit of genre fun. It actually feels like two distinct movies (and nearly runs as long as that, clocking in at a two and a half hours, a runtime that at some points feels actually punishing) with two distinct tones and styles.
The first half of the film plays almost like a David Fincher-ian meditation on the rot of the modern soul. As the film opens, the camera sails down NYC streets, the skyscrapers cast as tombstones against the sickly-green sky. When the title card appears over the lonely image of a man who literally worked himself to death, it’s easy to assume that this is a film with Something To Say, a Great Statement on the World As It Is.
Nah.
Whatever pretense Wellness might have had for thematic weight, Verbinski bails on them midway through and instead puts all his energy towards stringing together as many nightmarish setpieces and images as he can.
And, to be clear, Verbinski can conjure up some DOOZIES. Over the course of two-plus hours, Verbinski runs throughout just about every trauma imaginable involving teeth, eels, water tanks, you name it. Verbinski’s always had a flair for the grotesque, even in his more family oriented films like the Pirates trilogy or Rango. Freed by his R-rating, there’s a malevolent glee to the way he packs his haunted castle with creeps and freaks, particularly in the Grand Guignol finale, which plays like if Roger Corman was given a blockbuster budget for one of his Edgar Allan Poe pictures.
The cast is certainly willing to try whatever Verbinski asks of them. With his haunted pallor, DeHaan looks nothing like a conventional movie star, and Lockhart is nothing like a traditional hero. He’s an asshole, and a pretty major one, and much of the film’s dark humor comes from seeing just how much physical and psychological punishment can be piled on to him. Isaacs, meanwhile, is just having a hammy good time with his turn as a doctor who may or may not know more than he lets on. Isaacs has played this sort of material dozens of times before, and he plays it with a wink and a smile. When the film finally rips the brakes off and sends the rollercoaster cars screaming down the hill, Isaacs gets the wildest material to play ,and he tears into it with gusto.
But the problem is that Wellness is just never as fun as it needs to be. I mentioned both Shutter Island and Crimson Peak beforehand, and a big part of what made both those films work is that neither Martin Scorsese nor Guillermo del Toro were at all ashamed by the crazy pulp underlining their respective films. They leaned into it, letting things push right to the very edge of camp (and maybe over the edge, in the case of Jessica Chastain’s goth goddess in Peak). I have no doubt that Verbinski could hit that same sweet spot, but Wellness is serious to the point of stodgy.
And I keep coming back to that length. It’s a stupid thing to harp on, but as I watched the big endgame play out, I couldn’t help but think about how folks like Corman and Mario Bava could crank out films with this exact same plot and structure in 80 minutes flat. Verbinski has cited Lovecraft as a specific influence, and the Old Providence Spook’s version of this would’ve taken up 30–40 pages, max. But Wellness just goes on and on, and many viewers may well lose patience with the slow burn before it reaches the fuse.
I don’t know if it was the length, but audiences pretty much immediately rejected Wellness in theaters. That’s a shame, as for all its flaws I can honestly say that Wellness isn’t like any other studio horror film made in a long, long time, and every horror fan owes themselves at least one viewing. If nothing else, Verbinski’s abilities as a visual stylist are second to none, and he is operating at the absolute peak of his powers with this film.
Ordinarily, the commercial failure of a flawed-but-interesting original genre film like this would have seriously bummed me out and left me despairing about horror films’ prospects at the box office without brand name recognition. But with both Split and (especially) Get Out crushing critical and commercial homeruns this year, it’s hard to get too upset about this one.
There is already evidence of a nascent cult following for Wellness, and I fully expect it to grow as time goes on. American studio horror films aren’t meant to be this expensive, this grand, or this willfully perverse. A Cure for Wellness doesn’t quite connect all the dots to become a great film, but it’s fascinating and gorgeous and well-worth at least one look.
