A Cure for Wellness is a new psychological suspense film that is overly long, predictable, tedious, and a real waste of time. If you want an idea of what the movie is, if you saw Shutter Island, you can pretty much predict how this movie goes. I thought Shutter Island wasn’t nearly as good or mysterious as it thought it was but, compared to Cure, it was a brilliant.
Anyhow, this film is by Gore Verbinsky and, based on the trailer, I thought it was going to be his return to good horror suspense. He made The Ring before falling into the big budget Hollywood movie trap with the Pirates of the Carribean movies and Lone Ranger. While the movie certainly looks good, it’s interesting and beautiful imagery is largely all shown in the trailers. To their credit though, the trailers I saw didn’t ruin the plot of the movie (though it did ruin individual scenes).
Basic premise is that DeHaan is a junior exec for an investment firm who must travel to the Alps and retrieve a senior exec who is needed for a corporate merger. Upon arriving in the gorgeous European castle turned health spa, he progressively falls deeper and deeper into a hugely predictable suspense film that’s full of obvious dour pronouncement by characters that are basically informing us ponderously that This is Important and Something Mysterious Is Happening.
The sad thing is, you can probably predict the ending within the first 30 minutes of a 2 1/2 hour movie. I was a little slow, probably figuring it out in the first hour…. but it’s one of those movie that makes the character stupid and it has one of those scenes where he discovers slowly what’s going on. Unfortunately, it was already so obvious I was surprised the film was wasting my time with this realization scene.
Also should note the movie is pretty gross and sordid… some imagery and sequence will not only creep you out but also may just pissed you off. Because its an arty movie that, in its final thirty minutes, kind of turns into a cheep exploitation flick. It has one scene that was just repellent – not in that it was happening (though that may irritate you) but in that it kept going on and on and the camera never flinches… it stays focused in a cheap, sadistic way. I won’t say what was happening since that would be major spoilers.
So, anyhow, this might have been a decent movie if it had an hour of redundant sequences cut from the movie and some of its generic self-important pretensions removed. Maybe far fewer ponderous comments from characters that only exist to drop super-obvious hints.
I highly recommend you avoid the movie… though I will give a bit of a pass that maybe if you haven’t seen a bunch of movies like this, it will be somewhat of a surprise to you. Maybe something you might like. But I think anyone with any familiarity with psychological suspense movies will have seen this before and will fully be able to predict the ending.
Score: 60