You know, the thing that pisses me off about Gore Verbinski is that he’s one of our best directors, but has recently been only servicing stuff that kind of sucks. His last good movie might have been Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (because yes it is that good, and Rango has some serious structural problems). And that line about “best directors” isn’t really kidding. Watch the first two Pirates movies, The Ring, and the last 20 minutes of The Lone Ranger and this is obvious. This is a man who knows how to keep the camera rolling on the spectacle (which he does do in Cure) but can’t seem to catch a break on his scripts. This is all inevitably leading to the fact that no, A Cure For Wellness is not that great, but not because of Verbinski. The direction is as good as ever. It’s just servicing something that kind of sucks. For all the posturing as to how this movie is so weird and horrifying that you either can sit through it or run away, the real question should be how long can you put up with the movie continuously getting more and more preposterous and cryptic to the point of making any audience member get up and walk out if the direction and performance weren’t so alluring. The story of a Mr. Lockhart ( a still effective if a little empty Dane DeHaan) traveling to a wellness center in the Swiss Alps, that soon turns into a hydro-infused nightmare, is actually pretty cool, and if it didn’t complicate itself with so much unexplained motivation and convolution and just played like a straight horror story, it might have become a horror classic. Visually it does that, but narratively much like Justin Haythe’s previous script for Verbinski it gets all bogged down in doing an impression of the movie it’s trying to be and forgetting to make sense out of all of it. The first hour or so when the pieces of the mystery going on are up in the air and we’re still guessing is a suspenseful hour of film, pushed by the sumptuous production design and scenes playing out like something a young Tim Burton would present us with, and then the actual goings-on, well, go on and the movie devolves into nonsense. Honestly, a serialistic trip through the various horrors of the wellness center, like at the start, without any real explanation other than Verbinski promptly commanding his audience, “Look at all this beautiful and terrifying stuff,” would probably have left a better taste in our mouths. This film’s ending is akin to something like Crimson Peak and the whole final act of the movie plays out like Verbinski and Haythe trying to ape Tim Burton and Guillermo Del Toro and not getting either right. But all that said, yeah it is kind of hard to hate the ambition that Verbinski brings to the direction of this film as well as the fact that everything else in the movie other than the script is REALLY excellent. The effects are gloriously brutal, with Verbinski never cutting away when he gets the chance to show the audience something that they’ll never forget. Of course, this being a big studio movie, the film never gets REALLY grotesque (the high watermark of recent can be afforded to NWR’s excellent The Neon Demon), but when it gets the chance there are some pretty spine tingling moments. These moments, though, shouldn’t be the ones you appreciate. Verbinski has always had a knack for displaying beautiful canvases and here there are some breathtaking spectacle shots that seem to excite the movie more than when some brutal touch is burning its way into your brain. There are some especially eye-popping stylistic flourishes that do feel a bit empty when seen but are still impressive. The music is also excellent, with Benjamin Wallfisch nightmare inducing score (especially the main theme) framing the events of the movie in an almost odd childish nightmare/fable type way, that does the film a lot of favors as it starts to trip over its own narrative ambition. A Cure For Wellness will probably play better to you if you care little for its plot and more for its look, and for the record, it is miles better than most other horror films that have come out in the past few months. If you have an interest, go see it, just don’t expect it to iron together in such a satisfying way.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |