Long before A Cure for Wellness lobs at least 17 different endings at the increasingly beleaguered viewer – each sillier than the last – one realises that this mostly enjoyable gothic nonsense has collapsed under the weight of its own pointlessly elaborate mythology.
And it all starts so well. Lockhart (Dane DeHaan, marvellous), an ambitious young pup who has clearly read far too much Ayn Rand, is dispatched to retrieve his company’s CEO from an exclusive spa in the Swiss Alps.
Once there – naturally, the spa is located in a forbidding castle on a hill – our hero is given the run-around by nurses in cod-Victorian uniforms and, eventually, by the oily doctor (Jason Isaacs) who runs the institute. A car collision with a stag ensures that Lockhart can’t leave. Weirdness ensues.
Who is the mysterious child-woman (Mia Goth) who appears to have come straight from an Alice in Wonderland cosplay event? What is in the mysterious indigo 'vitamin' bottles that the spa staff keep imbibing? (Hey: aren't those awfully like bottles used in Lucile Hadzihalilovic?'s Evolution?) Why is that orderly reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain? What happens on the staff-only floors?
The answers will amaze and confuse you. Stay tuned for the legend of an incestuous Baron, something about water and dehydration, something about childhood trauma, and something else about eels and tooth-loss. An absurdly over-long run time allows the film to keep on answering questions that we never asked.
Having taken his leave from The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Verbinski has fun and frolics with gothic tropes. Taps drip ominously thanks to Douglas Murray and David Farmer's splendidly chilly sound design. An all-white ballroom sequence offers a bleached reworking of The Masque of the Red Death.
The videogame playing Nazi-punks who live in the local village make for a neat, contemporary variation on maggoty peasants. Bojan Bazelli’s cinematography is disconcertingly clinical and clean.
The film’s icky creeping and perving around Mia Goth is rather less appealing. The normally excellent thespian is saddled with a character than can only yearn for the relative depth and sass of a silent-era heroine tied up to rail tracks. Woman in Refrigerator? More like she’s jammed into one those six-pack coolers used for picnics.
It’s left to the tech specs, atmospherics, and the froideur between DeHaan and Isaacs to save this frustrating, entertaining mess from its own excesses.
