A Cure for Wellness (2017)
Directed by Gore Verbinski
An ambitious young executive is sent to retrieve his company's CEO from an idyllic but mysterious "wellness center" at a remote location in the Swiss Alps but soon suspects that the spa's miraculous treatments are not what they seem.
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What critics say influenced A Cure for Wellness
The visual cues are from Kubrick and Hitchcock — imagery suggesting “The Shining” and “A Clockwork Orange” and Hitch’s “Spellbound.”
Lockhart’s journey into darkness obviously mirrors Jonathan Harker’s own lurid adventure in Bram Stoker’s vampire tale, but the movie is also heavily influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s visions of sterile hallways and maddeningly kind servants with wicked smiles in The Shining.
In the case of A Cure for Wellness, it’s difficult to separate the inert, interminable 146-minute end product—a goofy, gory psychological thriller that cribs liberally from the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, and Hammer Horror productions, among other influences—from the PR, specifically the “visionary” label affixed to director and cowriter Gore Verbinski.
What happens when the impresario behind two manic Pirates of the Caribbean flicks and Rango sets out to emulate The Shining?
Echoing the best elements of Kubrick's The Shining, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Scorsese's Shutter Island, Verbinski indulges in every twisted, macabre instinct.
For the record, the veteran filmmaker appears to have seen and adored Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, Shutter Island and Crimson Peak, as well as countless '30s gothic fright fests, '70s Italian giallo films, '80s body horror flicks and everything Alfred Hitchcock ever made.
It is style for the sake of style with none of the integral tactility of something like Shutter Island, which this film clearly admires.
A thick, festering chunk of psychological horror that feels like a full-bodied Guillermo del Toro remake of “Shutter Island,” this woozy 146-minute nightmare does for workaholics what Val Lewton did for cat people, and it does so in ridiculous style.
But A Cure for Wellness soon veers away from Matrix-like concepts and starts to resemble Shutter Island, as Lockhart begins to uncover the lunacy at the institute’s center.
If you distill Cure down to its basic elements, though, it’d be safe to say it feels like if Hammer Films did their own version of Shutter Island, but really, that only accounts for about 30% of what Verbinski achieves here.
Like a cross between the characters Leonardo DiCaprio played in “Shutter Island” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” he’s an unscrupulous and quite possibly unhinged young investment shark, dispatched to Switzerland to retrieve a senior partner who appears to have gone a bit crazy there.
A Cure For Wellness is what happens when you mix the noir-ish shades of Shutter Island with the Hammer Horror overtones of Crimson Peak, and mix in a dash of Bioshock for good measure.
Lockhart tries to solve the mystery that’s contained by the Alpine castle and embraced by its docile residents, but it’s a lot of toing and froing, alleviated only occasionally by vivid scenes of horror: most notably, the extended death throes of a wounded elk and an episode in a dentist’s chair that rivals the one in Marathon Man.
So off he goes, ending up at the facility -- a centuries-old castle run by a doctor (Jason Isaacs) who has a Germanic accent and deploys the sort of dentistry we haven’t seen since Marathon Man.
When the upstart stockbroker tries to retreat down the mountain, a car accident finds him becoming the alpine fortress’ newest patient; incest, hardcore gaslighting, pornographically opulent set design, enough creepy nurses to make Lucile Hadzihalilovic blush, and the most agonizing display of dentistry since “Marathon Man” ensue.
By throwing in some Nazi overtones via blond haircuts and Marathon Man references, Verbinski firmly connects contemporary Californian wellness bullshit to the nastiest of European body-narratives.
Isaacs appears to be channeling a Nazi stereotype—something accentuated by a scene lifted from “Marathon Man,” yet another of the obvious influences here.
There are sequences involving eels that make eels seem even creepier than they did already, and a dentistry-as-torture scene that makes the one in “ Marathon Man ” look like a routine cleaning.
The picture also recalls Roman Polanski’s depiction of friendly torment and hysterical paranoia in Rosemary’s Baby, right down to Benjamin Wallfisch’s demonic lullaby which stalks Lockhart every step of the way—another effective element that after nearly three hours loses its menace from overuse.
For the record, the veteran filmmaker appears to have seen and adored Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, Shutter Island and Crimson Peak, as well as countless '30s gothic fright fests, '70s Italian giallo films, '80s body horror flicks and everything Alfred Hitchcock ever made.
Director Gore Verbinski (The Ring, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise) spins a gothic horror tale in the vein of Rosemary's Baby, though his movie seems to last forever and, when it finally ends, leaves a sour aftertaste of overproduced, overblown schlock.
But there are also too many self-consciously outre touches - a shot reflected in the eye of a stuffed animal, ominously dripping faucets, a "Rosemary's Baby" style lullaby on the soundtrack.
Then there’s the hospital’s sunny-yet-sinister head physician (Jason Isaacs, channeling Udo Kier), a weirdo teenage girl (Mia Goth) who sings and tra-la-las like she was up all night watching Rosemary’s Baby, and a host of strange medieval treatments that include curative waters, sensory- deprivation tanks, and eels — lots and lots of eels.
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Vaguely echoing the likes of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (although inferior to both), this movie transports us into an otherworld where things resemble those in ours but are overlaid by a strangeness that makes it hard to be drawn in.
All that will slowly lead to a final confrontation between him and the sinister doctor, in which the latter’s unholy plans are finally unmasked as his happily hooded patients dance wildly in the ballroom to the strains of a waltz by composer Benjamin Wallfisch (who elsewhere contributes a moody repeated theme) that sounds suspiciously similar to the one by Shostakovich that Kubrick used in “Eyes Wide Shut.”
Gothic horror (think of Bram Stoker’s Dracula , Rebecca , or Crimson Peak ) is all about mixing and contrasting the beautiful and damnable, the soothing and horrifying, the pure and the profane, to leave us both cringing and transported, unable to look away and not really wanting to either.
Echoing the best elements of Kubrick's The Shining, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Scorsese's Shutter Island, Verbinski indulges in every twisted, macabre instinct.
Like Francis Ford Coppola did in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Guillermo del Toro did more recently in Crimson Peak (2015), Verbinski is not only mining the narrative traits and signifiers of gothic and Victorian horror, but trying to evoke the overall feel of the genre’s roots.
The visual cues are from Kubrick and Hitchcock — imagery suggesting “The Shining” and “A Clockwork Orange” and Hitch’s “Spellbound.”
Make no mistake, the script by Justin Haythe and director Gore Verbinski is a total crock and doesn’t make sense even on its own wacky terms; Haythe and Verbinski came up with only half a story, finally resorting to visual echoes of movies from Hitchcock’s Spellbound to Last Year at Marienbad and Mystery of the Wax Museum.
Dr. Volmer (Jason Isaacs) runs the place, and he and his sylph-like, strange daughter Hannah (Mia Goth) evoke Georges Franju’s “Eye’s Without a Face” (1960) when the film doesn’t drift off into Cronenberg territory or Roman Polanski’s “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (1967).
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The visual cues are from Kubrick and Hitchcock — imagery suggesting “The Shining” and “A Clockwork Orange” and Hitch’s “Spellbound.”
Much like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, DeHaan is expected to do the film's heavy lifting while depicting his own slide into insanity and undergoing torture on par with Malcolm McDowell's in A Clockwork Orange – and he's not up to the task.
And yet, for a film that is clearly inspired by “The Shining,” “Rear Window,” and “The Devils,” Verbinski may display the fastidious filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, but his film never comes close to having any of the lurid fun of Ken Russell.