In A Cure for Wellness, Mr. Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), an ambitious young Wall Streeter is sent to retrieve his company’s AWOL CFO from a remote medical facility in the Swiss Alps located at the former site of a castle in which a rich baron experimented on local townspeople in order to cure his sister’s infertility so they could commit incest 200 years prior. While there, he meets the facility’s head physician Volmer (Jason Issacs) and a mysterious young girl Hannah (Mia Goth) and slowly uncovers the wellness center’s nefarious deeds.
The film touches on some interesting and timely themes such as what wellness is, our more material, worldly successes or our mental well-being, and how society’s elite use those in the social strata beneath them to enrich their own lives but the slow and prodding plot prevent them from being properly explored and expounded upon. Here, Dr. Volmer, who is actual the 200 year old baron in disguise, uses the bodies of high powered executives in order to keep he and his daughter/sister Hannah, alive long enough to conceive a baby of “pure blood.” The allegory for our society’s current problem with economic inequality where workers are conditioned to give of themselves to their employers for the benefit of the few at the top is clear. In the standard, villain’s monologue, the baron explains how getting man to abandon things that give life meaning such as God and social hierarchy in order to worship at the “empty altar” of one’s own ambition has both resulted in the most productive period of time in human history, and provided him with willing subjects for his “wellness” experiments rather than the forced peasants he used centuries ago. Here, these driven, ambitious, successful people still feel an emptiness despite all they’ve accomplished; a mental “unwellness” derived from a life of obsessing over work and professional success at the expense of all else. Dr. Volmer/The Baron explains that the cure to this human condition is the very non-existent disease that he has convinced he subjects they suffer from. For disease brings along hope, the hope for a cure. An interesting premise that while written well, does not connect fully due to the muddled way in which it’s presented. The film serves us with two instances of Mr. Lockhart seemingly becoming to resigned to his fate and then snapping out of it to continue digging, making it seem bloated and unnecessarily prolonged.
The performances in the movie are pretty good and the cinematography is great at times as well. DeHaan does well as an arrogant young financier that slowly discovers the strange secrets of the environment surrounding him and descends into madness at the same time. Issacs does equally well as a secretly nefarious doctor manipulating everyone and everything around him.
A Cure for Wellness is a film with a lot of potential for greatness that was thwarted by an overwrought plot and a runtime that was one half hour too long. Though the ending was somewhat satisfying, that we waited through thirty minutes of unnecessary plot for it to finally begin to unveil itself robbed it of any strength it may have had had it come sooner. Succinctness is one of a writer’s greatest tools (something I continue to try to hone in my own reviews). This film could have stood for some of its own.
Image: 20th Century Fox
