Musings on... A Cure for Wellness

A Cure for Wellness is a good-looking guy or girl standing alone at the bar. They look great, only something about them suggests they don’t actually have anything to say. You finally go up to them, and… they don’t. They’re even better-looking than you realized, but there’s nothing interesting beneath the surface. And now you’re stuck there, in a superficial, unengaging conversation that goes on, and on, and on. All they ever seem to do is repeat what they’ve heard other people say. That’s this movie. 

Make no mistake about it: A Cure for Wellness is gorgeous to look at. It’s not like they didn’t have anything to work with – the bulk of the movie is set in the midst of the Swiss Alps, after all – but the natural wonders frequently take on sublime qualities here. 

Every single frame has been carefully thought through and deliberately set up, with the internal scenes nearly as visually effective as the external. The camera is generally still, the static nature of the shots encouraging you to soak in every detail. When the camera does move, it does so with a swooping, dreamlike quality; one that is emblematic of the movie in its finer moments.

I was surprised to find out, when the end credits rolled, that the movie’s director was Gore Verbinski. What I wrote in that previous paragraph probably doesn’t chime with your idea of Verbinski’s skillset any more than it does mine. 

This is, after all, the master craftsmen most famously behind such critically-acclaimed masterpieces as Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. IMDB ratings leave a lot to be desired, but for the sake of conversation, Verbinski’s oeuvre has averaged a 6.88/10 rating across 10 outings. Not good, not terrible, just completely and utterly OK.  

I was surprised to find out Gore Verbinski directed this movie… and then I thought about it for five more seconds, and I wasn’t. Because lots of people can make a film look good. The cinematographer, for instance, or the art director: Grant Armstrong, in this case, who in recent years has served the same role on good movies Les Misérables, X-Men: First Class and The Danish Girl. What the director is responsible for is the overarching feel of the piece, and pretty quickly this starts to feel like a very, very derivative movie indeed.

It begins promisingly enough: a high-powered stockbroker gets a strange letter from a colleague who went AWOL, before resurfacing at a mysterious facility in Switzerland which will ‘heal’ him. The stockbroker immediately has a heart attack, which seems like little more than a device to quickly crowbar in the main character. He – ‘Lockhart’, played by Dane DeHaan – is called upstairs the next day and, through some contrivance or other, is sent to go and get the runaway banker back from the Alps. 

Like this movie, even that setup scene begins promisingly enough, with our hero facing a grade-A roasting from his dead-eyed superiors. Then someone makes an explicit, racial, prison-rape-in-the-shower joke that I thought had gone out of fashion at least ten years ago.

“Ah,” you sigh to yourself, face dropping a little. “I thought, for two minutes there, that this was going to be an intelligent, fresh take on the ‘institute that isn’t what it seems’ psychological thriller subgenre. But it’s not. A smart movie wouldn’t have made that joke. Brain; take the next couple of hours off.”

After that small, missed beat the movie takes a nosedive into dumbness, and stays there for the rest of the running time. From the moment our intrepid hero arrives at the institute, you can either precisely chart out, or at least make an educated guess at, every single step that the movie will take. The plot points aren’t so much signposted, as boomed down to you by someone standing on the top of an Alp with an enormous, brass horn.

“No, I’m leaving the institute tonight,” our hero insists when they ask if he’d like a room to stay in. “Oh no you’re not!” the audience choruses. “I’m not a patient here!” he scoffs when someone asks which treatment room he’s supposed to be in. “You will be soon!” we crow gleefully. “Did you try our water?” a nurse asks. “Are you drinking enough water?” queries a doctor. “Our water really is world famous,” boasts another staff member. “Don’t drink the water!” we all shout; alas, to no avail.

It could have been so much better. As mentioned, it’s visually unfaultable. There’s nothing wrong with the soundtrack. It’s fairly well-cast too, with Jason Isaacs* – the institution’s faultlessly polite but ever-sinister director – the standout performer. Unfortunately, it’s saddled with an utterly forgettable script, and Gore Verbinski.

If you’re going to make a movie in such a well-trodden subgenre as this, you either need to A) Absolutely nail it; or B) Fix your glance firmly sideways, put your tongue firmly in cheek, and have a little fun with the whole thing. The creators of A Cure for Thinking Too Hard took option C) Let’s just make another one!

Over all of this, the shadow of Shutter Island looms large. It was the last big budget entry into the genre to grace our cinema screens, and it resolutely went with option A) Absolutely nail it.

All the same plot beats are there in both movies: troubled main character with a tragic past visits an institute which seems perfect at first glance; institute’s director couldn’t be more pleasant and welcoming; wouldn’t you know it, everything is not as it seems; main character becomes an inmate; plot twist towards the end; done. And yet Shutter Island was tense, well-acted, perfectly structured and memorable.

It also, lest we forget, had Martin Scorcese instead of Gore Verbinski, and Leonardo DiCaprio instead of Dane DeHaan (in several scenes here, particularly those involving the semi-love interest Mia Goth, DeHaan seems almost to be attempting a DiCaprio impression). On top of that, you can throw in a score from the best composer in Hollywood – Hans Zimmer – which, even though it consisted largely of a ship loudly honking its horn, for better or for worse changed blockbuster soundtracks for years to come.

A Cure for Insomnia seems to assume you’ve never seen one of these movies before. Shutter Island knew firmly which subgenre it was in; and you knew that it knew. Yet it still managed to be tense, even moving in parts, and above all an enjoyable, engaging experience. This movie is none of those things. Nobody will remember it for anything more than being a pale, unnecessary comparison piece to Scorsese’s brilliant B-movie. And, when all’s said and done, that’s all it really is: Shitter Island.

*Hello to Jason Isaacs