A Cure for Wellness

Trim the excess running time from director Gore Verbinski’s latest, and this old-school horror with a lesson would make quite the impression. However, at two-and-a-half hours, A Cure for Wellness is as needlessly overlong as Verbinski’s all-around insufferable The Lone Ranger, and his Pirates of the Caribbean films.

At least this time out, the “more is better” aesthetic includes a seductive, creeping atmosphere and mesmerizing visuals. And there’s a clear moral guiding the tale, one that takes shape in the opening scene, where we’re treated to low-angle shots of the ominous steel-and-glass high-rises of a metropolis. In one of those office buildings, someone is burning the midnight oil and on his way to having a fatal heart attack for it, the film’s first overt suggestion that we’re working ourselves to death. His passing means a colleague must travel to a Swiss health spa and retrieve a senior executive whose presence is required for the company’s upcoming merger. That task falls to Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), who does so at the command of company masters that signify merciless corporate evil. From the heart attack, to the sanitarium, to the expression on Lockhart’s face that concludes the film, Verbinski and screenwriter Justin Haythe are elaborately addressing the question, What’s the sense in over-working yourself to the point where you have to go someplace just to feel well again?

The cinematography’s sickly greenish tint mirrors the ill physical and mental health of everyone in the movie, including Lockhart himself, whose eyes are ringed with dark circles and whose emaciated body betrays a lack of care. Flashbacks reveal a heavy psychological burden that weighs on him as well, one that Verbinski and Haythe fill in just enough to get the idea across without a surfeit of exposition. The heart of that idea—the futility of the rat race—is the subject of a letter from Lockhart’s target, Pembroke (Harry Groener). Pembroke’s stay at the sanitarium has apparently led to a spiritual awakening, and has helped him cast off “the illusion of success.”