One star. Rated R, for graphic nudity, rape, profanity, violence and highly disturbing images
By Derrick Bang
File this one under You’ve Got To Be Kidding.
Successful directors with runaway
egos are to be feared. Sooner or later, many of them succumb to self-indulgent,
often “long-nurtured” vanity projects that defy reason and emerge as
ludicrously bloated and self-indulgent. Some badly dent or even ruin careers;
others bankrupt studios.
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| Having been injured under suspicious circumstances, Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) decides to explore the mysterious sanitarium where none of the resident clients show any desire to leave. |
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas
stumbled badly, respectively, with 1941
and Howard the Duck. Andy and Lana
Wachowski blew their Matrix profits
on Speed Racer. Warren Beatty and
Dustin Hoffman still get taunted for Ishtar.
Eddie Murphy simply didn’t survive the fallout from The Adventures of Pluto Nash; director Renny Harlan suffered the
same fate, after Cutthroat Island.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz nearly took down Fox, with Cleopatra. Michael Cimino did
destroy United Artists, with Heaven’s
Gate.
There are many, many more ... and
to their company we now can add Gore Verbinski, the arrogant driving force
behind A Cure for Wellness.
Savvier Hollywood types should
have known better, given that Verbinski already demonstrated his tendency
toward wretched excess, with his recent update of The Lone Ranger. But the fact that he also helmed the first three
wildly successful Pirates of the
Caribbean installments apparently blinded Those In Charge to all the red
flags that should have been waving, from their first glimpse of this new
project’s misbegotten script.
I’ve a theory that “high-class
horror” is an oxymoron. Successfully scary movies, by their very nature, seem
to demand modest (even microscopic) budgets and the exhilarating momentum that
results from ground-level, guerrilla-style filmmaking; this has been true ever
since producer Val Lewton chaperoned his B-unit shockers for RKO Pictures, back
in the 1940s.
Commercial success for such
endeavors often is a happy surprise, rather than a specific goal.
But the moment an A-list
director, armed with a prestige budget, tries
to make a “serious” fright flick ... the resulting flop almost is inevitable.
See Exhibit A: Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. Oh, it’s beautiful to look
at, and Kubrick gets points for instilling a creepy atmosphere ... but scary?
Hardly. Unintentionally funny, perhaps, but not terrifying; it’s too antiseptic
and soulless to induce nightmares.
Which brings us to A Cure for Wellness, and its ponderous,
insufferably calculated pretense of horror. Verbinski didn’t merely direct this
bloated travesty; he also co-wrote the original script with Justin Haythe, who
also collaborated on The Lone Ranger.
(Ahem.) The result gets off to a reasonably promising start — to be fair — but
quickly succumbs to laborious, overwrought theatrics and self-indulgently arty
tableaus.
As with Kubrick’s Shining, Verbinski’s new film is
visually gorgeous; the remote Alpine setting positively sparkles, as viewed
through cinematographer Bojan Bazelli’s lens. The opening train and car trips
are quite literally breathtaking.
I’ve always felt that secluded
health spas were rather creepy in their own right, so setting this tale within
one also seemed a good start.
Too bad Verbinski flushes such
potential away with the bonkers-stupid adventure that follows.
The premise is simple: Young Wall
Street stockbroker Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) is sent to retrieve the firm’s CEO,
Pembroke (Harry Groener), who checked into a high-class health spa in the Swiss
Alps ... and hasn’t returned. Indeed, once Lockhart reaches this eerily
tranquil sanitarium, he finds that none
of its many wealthy clients has any desire to leave.
“Why should I?” is the repeated
response, somewhat like a rehearsed chant, when Lockhart chats with folks. “I
feel so good here.”
Adding to the place’s sense of
wrongness, the staff goes out of its way to prevent Lockhart from even seeing
Pembroke, insisting that such a meeting would “disrupt” his therapy. Lockhart
gets nowhere until finally meeting the facility’s director, the superficially
genial but clearly sinister Dr. Volmer (Jason Isaacs), who speaks in platitudes
about how modern society, by its very tempestuous nature, has made people sick.
Even if they don’t realize this.
“Only when we know what ails us,”
Volmer smiles, with fortune-cookie sincerity, “can we hope to find the cure.”
Verbinski displays his
contemptible sensibilities shortly thereafter, by lingering on the death-throes
of an elk struck by a car: a gratuitous, thoroughly deplorable and needlessly
gruesome tableau that’s made no less offensive by the knowledge that it’s a CGI
creature.
No surprise: Circumstances
conspire to keep Lockhart within the institution’s walls. Drink plenty of
water, Volmer suggests; it’s “miracle stuff,” and it’ll also offset the
dehydration-induced lightheadedness caused by the high elevation.
Alone in his room, Lockhart duly
swallows a glassful of the sparkling liquid. Then he notices, sticking to the
inside of the glass, a tiny something that wriggles,
once he examines it closely.
Despite this, apparently deeming
it inconsequential, Lockhart spends the rest of the film blithely drinking the water.
Oh, pul-leaze.
Right there, Verbinski lost
control of his film, and the respect of his audience ... and never regained
either. As portrayed by DeHaan, Lockhart is smart, cynical and suspicious;
there’s simply no way he’d have continued to consume an unknown liquid polluted
with such icky little whatzits.
Idiotic behavior and the absence
of logic merely intensify, from this point forward.
Given that Volmer and his
facility conceal Big, Dark Secrets, it seems odd that Lockhart remains
unsupervised, and is allowed to roam freely, discovering various ooky things
along the way. You’d think, after the first Big Reveal, that Volmer would wise
up and confine Lockhart to his room. Nope. The kid roams freely again, makes
another gruesome discovery, earns another reproach from Volmer, and gets sent
back to his room. Where he’s once again left unguarded, and free to wander to
another level of awfulness.
Again: Oh, pul-leaze.
Along the way, Lockhart discovers
that the spa was built from the reconstructed ruins of a castle that was burned
to the ground two centuries earlier, when local villagers learned of the
resident baron’s unwholesome medical experiments on his family members. Volmer,
clearly enchanted by the baron’s work, also is obsessed with purity; everything
in the sanitarium is white and immaculately sterile.
The institutional weirdness is
augmented further by the presence of Hannah (Mia Goth), a barefoot,
mysteriously shy and oddly naïve young woman who can’t help catching Lockhart’s
eye. Unlike the other clients, she dresses and behaves more individually. She
confesses to having spent her entire life at the sanitarium, under the
protective gaze of her guardian, Volmer.
At which point, it’s pretty
obvious where we’re going. Eventually.
Very eventually. Because the only truly horrifying
thing about this film is that it drones on ... and on ... and on ... for an interminable, unendurable,
inexcusable, butt-numbing 146 minutes. Which, to belabor the obvious, is at
least an hour too long.
I don’t care who makes it; no horror
film can justify such length.
Verbinski fills time by padding
his already thin-on-coherence storyline with ludicrously arty tableaus, weird
plot detours and gratuitously grotesque shock effects. The elderly patients’
nude bodies are displayed en masse, more than once, with the sort of
slow-motion pan that evokes unpleasant memories of Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. These same patients
apparently are able to survive long-term drowning, a detail that doesn’t scan
even within this numb-nuts setting.
At one point, all of these
elderly clients attack Lockhart, en masse, like slow-motion zombies. Say what?
At another charming juncture,
Volmer, finally annoyed by Lockhart’s constant intrusions, has one of the young
man’s front teeth drilled out. While we watch.
After which, the kid is returned
to his room, alone and unsupervised, yet again
free to wander and cause trouble. (Does nobody
learn in this story?)
Given that we keep getting
variations of the same dumb events, over and over and over again, it’s pretty obvious that Verbinski is adept at only one
thing: wasting our time.
Isaacs is appropriately ominous
as Volmer, but a little of that shtick goes a long way; even he can’t hold our
attention with the same mocking gaze and thin-lipped smile. And while we
initially sympathize with Lockhart, DeHaan can’t begin to make the kid’s
subsequent stupidity reasonable or even comprehensible. His “acting” devolves
to little more than bouncing between angry sneers and wide-eyed desperation: lather,
rinse and repeat.
As for the appropriately named
Goth, she definitely has an otherworldly bearing ... but she can’t act a lick.
Not that she gets much of a chance.
By the time Verbinski deigns to
answer this insufferably tedious story’s key mystery — which, frankly, has been
telegraphed long before — we’ve also endured three (four?) (five?) false
endings, en route to a final, laughably unsatisfying denouement. To which
everybody in the preview audience, a few weeks back, muttered Thank God.
Avoid this one like the plague.
Whatever you do, don’t drink Verbinski’s water.
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