REVIEW: “A Cure for Wellness” is about eels, sick people

“A Cure for Wellness” is one of those movies. With all its hype completely based on shock horror mixed with suspense, as well as its strange subject matter (and the fact that it’s directed by Gore Verbinski of “Pirates of the Caribbean” fame), wanting to watch “A Cure for Wellness” is almost akin to bile fascination, wherein you only want to see if everything that’s said about the movie is true, or just how gross it can get. It is also a movie about eels.

The film’s protagonist is known only by his last name, Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), a Wall Street businessman who fits every bit of the stereotype: he’s rude, swears a lot, has a history with smoking and so on.

Lockhart is sent to Switzerland to retrieve his company’s boss, Mr. Pembroke (Harry Groener). But once he arrives, all he finds is a peaceful sanitarium, full of happy, white-clad elderly patients who seem more than content to be there. The sanitarium’s director (Jason Isaacs) seemingly only cares for the well-being of his patients. But since this is a suspense/horror movie, there’s obviously plenty wrong with the place. And what’s with all the eels?

As mentioned before, the main quality this movie prides itself on is the fact that it’s supposed to be a sort of modern thriller, but it can only keep the suspense up for so long. Pembroke only seems to show up in the plot whenever it’s appropriate to remind viewers he was the reason for all this.

Any opportunity the movie has to actually scare and shock its viewers only serves as a lead-in to another bizarre moment that’ll leave you with more questions. Pair that with a series of cryptic messages, eel-themed hallucinations and an utterly confusing backstory, then “A Cure for Wellness” will feel more like “American Horror Story: Swiss Sanitarium.”

And that’s the thing — “A Cure for Wellness” bets a lot on the tropes and trappings of the thriller genre and similar movies without ever using them properly. There’s the creepy asylum, the perfect place with a dark secret, the weird out-of-place girl (Mia Goth). Even the main theme of the movie is a child eerily singing a little tune.

These are all elements we’ve seen before, either done straight or parodied. But in any other movie, they would actually give an atmosphere to a coherent story. Here, there’s too much for the audience to be creeped out by — if everything’s creepy, nothing really is. On top of it all, the tail end of the movie is completely different in tone to the rest of it. If the first two and a half hours of “A Cure for Wellness” feel like “AHS,” then the last half hour is straight out of “Pirates of the Caribbean,” tone-wise.

The acting doesn’t help matters either. DeHaan looks like he’s trying to channel Leonardo DiCaprio’s characters in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” yet loses himself in the process. Isaacs is so hammy it’s practically delightful, but his ridiculous German accent doesn’t help.

The rest of the cast is pretty much forgettable. Yes, even Goth, who plays the movie’s female lead: her character is bland and vague, and her backstory is absolutely absurd. Perhaps the best performance, really, would be from the eels — they make no sense whatsoever and were truly one of the few unsettling things in the movie.

To give credit where it’s due, though, the cinematography was honestly better than expected, mainly due to Bojan Bazelli, whose repertoire includes basically any major movie in the last 10 or so years. The sweeping shots of the castle in the alps really do play up the sense that Lockhart is trapped in the middle of nowhere. The colorful, saturated daytime shots of the sanitarium and eerie nighttime and interior shots, along with an almost masterful use of fog, add up to make for some pretty good visuals.

Will you have a fun time watching “A Cure for Wellness?” Maybe, if you’re into being thoroughly confused by a premise that barely makes sense in the first place, only to be completely blindsided by the ending of it. There are better “creepy scientist traps unwilling person in their mansion” stories out there. But if you want a good reason to yell about eels to your close friends, then you’ve certainly found the right movie.