A Cure for Wellness

“Who the hell takes the waters in the 21^st cen­tu­ry any­way?” The speak­er is an exec­u­tive in a New York finan­cial firm whose CEO Roland Pem­broke (Har­ry Groen­er) has gone AWOL to a sana­to­ri­um in the Swiss Alps.

On the eve of a merg­er worth bil­lions, the com­pa­ny receives a let­ter from Pem­broke in which he declares that he has seen the light, recog­nis­ing at last the sick­ness of his past life, and that he has no inten­tion of ever com­ing back. So the firm sends its most ambi­tious and dri­ven deal clos­er, Lock­hart (Dane DeHaan), to go fetch the boss.

Lockhart’s jour­ney begins in a mod­ern steel-and-glass metrop­o­lis, but he soon finds him­self in the old world of Europe, in a remote cas­tle that looks as though it belongs in a snow globe, or per­haps a goth­ic fairy tale. After a car acci­dent he becomes stuck in this Shangri-La, which none of the elder­ly res­i­dents – all for­mer cor­po­rate climbers and empire builders like Pem­broke – shows any desire to leave.

Left to wait for his leg-cast to be removed, Lock­hart explores his envi­rons, goes look­ing for Pem­broke, and befriends ​‘spe­cial case’ Han­nah (Mia Goth), a girl who is the only oth­er patient in the place below retire­ment age. Yet as he suc­cumbs to the water cure admin­is­tered by charm­ing Dr Hein­rich Volmer (Jason Isaacs) and his staff, Lock­hart too is con­front­ed with the van­i­ties and trau­mas of his past, even as the place grad­u­al­ly reveals a dark his­to­ry of its own. There is def­i­nite­ly some­thing in the water…

At once a mys­tery, a melo­dra­ma and a mus­ing on mor­tal­i­ty, Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Well­ness blends goth­ic style with asy­lum thrills, as well as the director’s trade­mark man­nered sur­re­al­ism. There are so many nods and winks here: the danse macabre of Sus­piria; the unortho­dox treat­ments of A Clock­work Orange; the uni­ver­sal mon­stros­i­ty of ​‘The Phan­tom of the Opera’, ​‘Drac­u­la’ and ​‘The Invis­i­ble Man’; and most promi­nent of all, the embed­ded para­noia of Shut­ter Island (with DeHaan chan­nel­ing Leonar­do DiCaprio). Yet this old-fash­ioned world, with its out­mod­ed cures, also neat­ly encap­su­lates and dis­tils our abid­ing 21^st cen­tu­ry aspi­ra­tions and anxieties.

Right from its open­ing scene in which a mid­dle-aged busi­ness­man, work­ing at night in his plush high-rise office, sud­den­ly col­laps­es from a heart attack, the film focus­es on the obses­sion with mon­ey mak­ing and the attain­ment of hier­ar­chi­cal sta­tus – in oth­er words the once Amer­i­can, now Glob­alised Dream – as a vain attempt to stave off the inevitabil­i­ty of death.

The let­ter which Pem­broke sends to the com­pa­ny may seem like the rav­ings of an old man who has lost his mind, but it is also a rea­soned cri­tique of every val­ue towards which Lock­hart and his col­leagues have direct­ed their lives. Yet the Alpine clin­ic, despite its con­stant promis­es of reju­ve­na­tion and well­ness, is itself a kind of mau­soleum, fes­tooned with the sym­bols (sag­ging, decrepit flesh and rot­ting teeth) of memen­to mori. And its lead­er­ship is no less cut­throat, exploita­tive and ruth­less­ly vam­pir­ic than those heads of indus­try back in New York.

Ancient or mod­ern, some things nev­er changed, and the well-heeled can no more be cured of their mor­tal­i­ty than any­one else. In the end, youth wins out. As it always does, how­ev­er tem­porar­i­ly. But it is also smil­ing through false teeth as it, like every­thing and every­one, heads slow­ly downhill.