Mia Goth is as fine a name as can be imagined for the actress playing a creepy, hollow waif in “A Cure for Wellness,” and her name is practically a tag line for this fantastically eerie movie: “Me a Gothic!”
A variant on “Shutter Island” and “The Wicker Man,” “A Cure for Wellness” sends a Wall Street jerk (Dane DeHaan, who looks like Leonardo DiCaprio’s sleepy little brother) to Switzerland in search of a missing executive for his firm, which wants to use him as a sacrificial lamb to feed to the Securities and Exchange Commission to win approval of a merger.
Colonel Kurtz-like, the executive has lost his mind and started sending home bizarre letters. But, unlike Kurtz, his quest is not to be a warlord. He seeks merely to cure his inner disquiet, and instead of retreating to the jungle, he has taken up residence in a sanitarium atop a Swiss mountain. So this is a journey into the heart of wellness.
Director Gore Verbinski has created a ravishing spectacle at this “Magic Mountain”-inflected spa, where a cadre of oldsters take the waters while under the stern supervision of starchy white-clad German-speaking staffers who are deeply kinky after dark. None of the patients ever seems to want to leave.
After a car accident, DeHaan’s Lockhart soon finds himself a patient at the resort discovering alarming details about what goes on in its sickly yellow baths, its dimly lit rooms containing strange phials and elixirs. The local water everyone is always exhorted to drink seems somehow unclean, while eels invade his session in a sensory deprivation tank. Or is it just psychological — the result of toxins being flushed out of his system, as the institute’s director (Jason Isaacs) suggests.
And who is Hannah (Goth), a mysteriously ethereal teen wandering the property silently? She mesmerizes Lockhart so completely that he can’t bring himself to walk away before things get really disturbing and he finds himself in a dentist’s chair surrounded by 1930s equipment.
As was the case with “Shutter Island” (which had a ridiculous ending), the pleasure here is not so much in where the story is leading but in the bleary, dreamlike atmosphere and deepening unease. With a stately, Kubrickian patience, Verbinski adds layer after layer of alarm and confusion to Lockhart’s psyche. Too many layers, actually; Lockhart spends well over an hour of screen time exploring his surroundings, learning about legends attached to the place, averting his eyes from nude octogenarians, etc.
But it’s all so chillingly twisted that the slow pace didn’t bother me. So rich is Verbinski’s imagery that it’s transfixing to wander through his fortress of the macabre.