Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness runs 146 minutes. It has castles, aquifers, a baron who married his sister, and a wellness center in the Swiss Alps where nobody is allowed to leave. It premiered at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema on December 10, 2016, and 20th Century Fox released it in theaters on February 17, 2017. It cost $40 million and grossed $26 million. That is a box-office bomb, and the math is not hard to understand.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Dane DeHaan and the Executive Who Cannot Leave
Dane DeHaan plays Lockhart, an executive at a New York City financial services firm. The board sends him to retrieve CEO Roland Pembroke, played by Harry Groener, who abruptly decided to stay at a “wellness center” in the Swiss Alps.
Lockhart arrives and meets resistance. Dr. Heinreich Volmer, played by Jason Isaacs, and the staff block him from speaking with Pembroke. Lockhart leaves. He crashes the car. He wakes up at the center, supposedly three days later, with his leg in a plaster cast.
Both he and the driver suffered only minor injuries in a horrendous collision. The film never explains how.
DeHaan is a capable actor. He spends most of the runtime confused, damp, and limping, which is roughly what the role asks for. He does it without complaint. The problem is that Lockhart is a cipher. He has no life outside the plot. He wants to leave. Then he wants to know what is happening. That is the whole arc.
Mia Goth, Jason Isaacs, and the Blue Bottles
Mia Goth plays Hannah, a young girl kept at the spa her entire life. She doses herself with a mysterious fluid from small blue bottles. She is the film’s best idea and its most mishandled one.
Goth is genuinely strange on screen in a way that cannot be taught. She was announced alongside DeHaan in April 2015; Isaacs joined that June.
Isaacs plays Volmer with a calm that curdles into menace. He is the most controlled presence in the movie.
Celia Imrie appears as Victoria Watkins, a patient who, along with residents of the nearby town, tells Lockhart the history of the spa. That history is where A Cure for Wellness briefly becomes interesting.
The Baron, the Sister, and the Aquifer
The spa was built on the ruins of a castle owned 200 years ago by a baron. He wanted an heir of pure blood. He married his sister.
When he learned she was infertile, he performed hellish experiments on the peasants to find a cure. He succeeded. Then the peasants found the carelessly buried bodies of his victims, stormed the castle, and set it on fire.
They captured the baron’s pregnant sister. The baby was cut from her womb before she was burned. The baby was thrown into the local aquifer and somehow survived.
That is a real story. It has cruelty, consequence, and a clean image at the end. It is the strongest material in the film.
Then it goes back to Lockhart limping down another corridor.
Hohenzollern Castle and the German Locations
The film is an international co-production based in the United States, Germany, and Luxembourg. It was shot on location at various German sites, including Hohenzollern Castle in Baden-Württemberg.
You can see the money. The production design is the strongest element here. The center is all tile, steam, and institutional green. The town below is gray and wet. The castle looms.
Critics praised the film’s visuals, cinematography, performances and ambition. That praise is easy to understand. Verbinski knows how to compose a frame.
What the film does with 146 minutes is another matter.
What A Cure for Wellness Does With Its Ideas
Haythe and Verbinski were inspired by Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain. That is a book about time, illness, and a sanatorium where people lose track of the world outside. It is a book of ideas.
A Cure for Wellness takes the setting and leaves the ideas. It has a spa, a patient who will not leave, and a young man who arrives to fetch him.
Here is what the movie gives you to work with:
- A wellness center in the Swiss Alps where no one is allowed to leave
- A baron who married his sister to get a pure-blooded heir
- A baby thrown into an aquifer who survived
- Blue bottles of a fluid that patients drink
- A young executive with a broken leg and no way out
- A girl named Hannah who has never seen the outside world
That is a strong list. A Cure for Wellness does not build anything out of it. It just keeps adding.
The Ballerina, the Bar, and the Dossier
Lockhart tries to escape. He finds no one is allowed to leave. He gives Hannah a ballerina figurine. With her help, he bikes into town.
He leaves her in a bar and goes looking for a translator for Pembroke’s German medical dossier. He learns that the people at the spa suffer from dehydration despite the water they drink from the aquifer.
Hannah, who has been kept at the spa her entire life, explores the bar and attracts the locals’ attention. Lockhart returns.
The runtime is 146 minutes. The mystery is not complicated. The cast is not large. The plot is a man trying to leave a building. Length has to buy something — dread, or detail, or a slow turn of the screw. This film does not buy enough of it.
The Score
A Cure for Wellness lands at 4.7 of 10. Metacritic sits at 47 out of 100.
The film received generally mixed reviews. Critics praised its visuals, cinematography, performances, and ambition. They criticized its length, script, and narrative. Both halves of that are correct, and the second half outweighs the first.
Ambition is worth something. A film that reaches for a real idea is more interesting than a film that reaches for nothing. But ambition is not a result.
A Cure for Wellness has a castle, an aquifer, a baron, a sister, a baby in the water, and a girl with blue bottles. It has Jason Isaacs at his most controlled and Mia Goth at her most uncanny. It has Hohenzollern Castle and a $40 million budget and 146 minutes to spend.
The tagline reads, “All of us are human. None of us are immune.”
That is the real failure. Not the gross. Not the reviews. The film had the pieces of something and no idea what to do with them.
A Cure for Wellness: 4.7 of 10.
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