A Perfect Waste of A Good Idea
Director: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Dane Dehaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth, Ivo Nandi and Harry Groener
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Rated: 18A
Running Time: 2 Hrs, 26 Mins
The book was better.
That’s a refrain you often hear about movies adapted from novels and 99% of the time its right. Books are a superior storytelling medium with much more time to develop characters, establish backstories and motivations and allow a properly layered plot to unfold. The Cure For Wellness is a perfect example of a good idea that would have been done far more justice as a book rather than a movie. Because as hard as the movie tries to tell this story, the best it can pull off is a slow, meandering mess that is the definition of underwhelming.
Video: 20th Century Fox
On the eve of a massive corporate merger, Lockhart (Dane Dehaan) is forced by his employers to retrieve his company’s estranged CEO (Harry Groener) from a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps. What should be a simple errand turns goes screaming off the rails in record time. Not only is Lockhart blocked at every turn by the sanatorium staff, but a car accident traps him at the retreat in question. He soon finds himself at the mercy of the increasingly mysterious staff.
Lockhart soon locks horns with Dr. Volmer (Jason Isaacs), the head of the sanatorium and soon finds himself questioning his sanity almost as much as the treatments he’s subjected to. While the world around him begins to beak down into chaos and the sanatorium’s dark past haunts the present, the mysterious young woman Hannah (Mia Goth) wanders amidst it all and may be the key to everything.
There are some interesting ideas in this movie but there is nowhere near enough time to explore them. When Wellness isn’t merely scratching the surface of an idea, it’s throwing completely useless stuff in. Worse yet, the movie thinks it’s being clever when it’s just coming off as a bloated mess. The fact that it can’t get a solid grip on any of its narrative threads in two and a half hours of screen time is a refection on how poor it’s equipped to tell a story.
Verbinski spends most of the movie trying to ratchet up the suspense but his attempts to wind the tension fall flat. Instead the movie plods along with an excruciating clumsiness from one scene to the next, many of which have no impact on the plot. This may be the slowest paced film in years, and since it fails to build an adequate story in that time its length works against it.
Another thing working against it is the unlikeability of the protagonist. Not only is Lockhart not the kind of guy you root for in a movie, rather he’s the kind you hope fails spectacularly. He is a Wall Street profiteer who not only would have been responsible for the worldwide economic crash of 2008, destroying millions of lives, but he would have slept soundly at night with a smile on his face. He considers everyone beneath both himself and his ambition and he’s even a bit of a jerk to his mom. The film’s attempts to explain why he turned out to be such an irredeemable narcissist are heavy handed and transparent. And if the audience has no reason to invest any emotion in the protagonist, a lengthy film is nearly unbearable.
There is some disturbing imagery and if the dentist makes you the slightest squeamish there’s one scene that will knock you out of your seat. But a movie, no matter how long, was not the proper medium to explore this story. There is definitely some storytelling potential here but a movie was a far too limited medium to do it justice. This could have easily succeeded as a novel or a mini-series a la American Horror Story or Stranger Things.
But a movie had no chance.
Image: 20th Century Fox
