Gore Verbinski directs Dane DeHaan, Mia Goth and Jason Isaacs in this movie mystery puzzle about an executive trying to escape a Swiss spa that no one ever leaves. 

Mixed emotions on this one. At two and a half hours this is frustratingly baggy, but there’s a decent creepy 90 minute long film in here that evokes Fincher, Polanski, Kubrick, Hitchock and Bernard Rose…. but by the eighth time our unlikeable protagonist finds himself back at the spa, chasing his own tail, you want to eat the screen… And yet there are some sharply nasty spikes outside of the endless looping plot. A nerve wracking visit to the local town, a gloopily gruesome revelation long after you’ve given up on the plot and many extreme sexually suggestive moments have a squirming transgressive tension. At its strongest, the movie feel like your are watching a porno version of an old Boris Karloff movie. All those names, all those influences above, maybe A Cure For Wellness works best as a primer, a gateway drug for the better creatives’ work. If young people catch movies late night anymore (do they?), then this distracting failure might inspire kids to explore energetic hack Verbinski’s cribbed influences further. And that’s no real bad thing, he’s at least misappropriating from the very best.

5