I've been waiting to see A Cure For Wellness for quite some time now. I first heard of it on a site that lists upcoming horror movies (where I've lost so many hours) a couple of years ago, and the one sentence synopsis - "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." - intrigued me. I don't know if you'd say I was hyped for it, but I was certainly interested. and now, after waiting for what seems like a long time, it's finally out in cinemas. So am I going to be disappointed, or not?
After he's caught cooking the books, a young sales executive called Lockhart is given a choice; take the fall for the company's financial irregularities himself, or go to Switzerland and bring back the company's CEO from a sanitarium to do so in his place. This task turns out to be harder than it seems, as the sanitarium has a strange hold on its patients - none of them want to leave and all believe that they suffer from a mysterious ailment that only the water treatments of this sanitarium can cure. Furthermore, when he tries to leave himself, Lockhart gets into an accident and finds himself confined there as well until he recovers. As he tries to investigate the sanitarium, he discovers numerous dark secrets and a mysterious young woman named Hannah who seems to be at the centre of all of them...
...See, this is exactly why I don't trust movie hype - even when it's my own hype. The chances of being genuinely surprised and impressed when a movie lives up to the hype are far, far smaller than the chances of being spectacularly disappointed. A Cure For Wellness is 146 minutes long, and I felt every painful minute of it. Really, this is the film that never ends; it just goes on and on, my friends. At one point, to try to stave off suicide by Malteaser, I started counting all the spots at which the film could have come to a natural ending, but didn't. Not including the actual ending, there were four points at which the film's narrative could have come to a natural, satisfying (or at least give the audience a sense of relief) ending, but just carried on regardless. And even after all that, it still leaves some plot points dangling.
So at least part of the reason for the film's ridiculous length is how thinly the plot and premise of it are stretched. Someone investigates and becomes trapped in a sinister health spa that's run by Lucius Malfoy (more on him later); there's something in the water, it's doing something to the patients, and somehow there's a connection between all that, the former Baron of the estate from 200 years ago and the mysterious waif-like young woman who wanders the grounds. I'm pretty sure I could get all of that presented, explored and solved in 90 minutes, maybe 100 at a push, but A Cure For Wellness is crammed full of so much filler that we're almost drowning in it. Every little plot point and not-very-cleverly-hinted-at clue is stretched out so thin they become about as flimsy as the dress Hannah flits about the grounds in. "She's like a daughter to me," Lucius says at one point somewhere in the first third of the film, cluing the audience (those who are still awake at least) in to a future "revelation" there and then, but the film decides to keep drawing it out for over an hour longer and drops at least two more sledgehammer hints before the film finally confirms what we all figured out some time ago. And gives us a disturbing attempted rape scene with it.
A Cure For Wellness is also stuffed full of poorly-explained symbolism, pretty locations and surreal setpieces, most of which just made me think of other films I'd rather be watching: The Neverending Story (not for the reasons you'd think...); One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest; Marathon Man (there's some genuinely cringe-inducing dental horror in one scene); Darkman; Phenomena; The Company of Wolves; and even Eyes Wide Shut. And as I said, even with a two-and-a-half-hour running time, some things still haven't been explained by the end. How much were the sanitarium staff involved in everything? What exactly was the deal with the eels? (And to be honest, some of them looked more like giant nematodes to me.) What's going to happen to all the patients after the end of the film? I don't think it would have taken that long to throw an explanation out there for at least some of those points, but no, we just get flashbacks to Lockhart's childhood trauma that never actually comes to anything, and endless shots of white-tiled bathrooms.
Okay, the setting and locations are very pretty, but they really have to be as a counterpoint to all the wrinkly, flabby, naked old people flesh we see throughout the film. Mia Goth is also very good as the mysterious, sheltered woman-child Hannah, and yes, Jason Issacs is also good as the (inevitably; it is Lucius Malfoy after all; he's not exactly going to be cuddling puppies by the film's climax) villain. But Lockhart - we never learn his first name so I chose to believe it was Gilderoy - is just a bland and not really unlikable character and periodically looks for all the world like he's just been slapped in the face with a wet fish. And the lack of a protagonist we can properly identify with is just the final nail in the coffin of this overlong, under-edited slog of a movie. I will never hype myself up about a movie again - until the next one.
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