The film is directed by Gore Verbinski Cure For Wellness, who also helmed the first three films of the Pirates of the Caribbean series (2003, 2006, 2007) and the first adaptation of The Ring (2002), as well as the much-maligned The Lone Ranger (2013). The movie stars Dane DeHaan as Lockhart, Jason Isaacs as Heinrich Volmer, and Mia Goth as Hannah.

The Tasteless Intricacies of Wellness Cure

Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness explores the toxic side effects of having too much money, and it’s a fitting sign of its obliviousness that the movie looks full of expensive effects from beginning to end. A series of irrational nocturnal observations of New York’s sleek-surfaced, glass-and-steel stalagmites of capitalist striving. It drips with a gaudy display from the very first shot. A certain striver sits alone in the corner of his office, laboring over financial charts and spreadsheets, literally working himself to death. Verbinski (director of the first three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies and “The Lone Ranger”) films this executive’s demise in a way that’s anything but simple.

Using the underlying technology:

Lockhart, an executive working for a New York-based financial company, travels to Switzerland to convince Mr. Pembroke to approve the sale of the company. Patients refuse to leave Pembroke at a spa facility where he is being treated. Patients remain in need of ‘miraculous’ treatments despite the extraordinary treatments they receive. After Lockhart takes back his superior, he is injured in a car accident and is hospitalized at this strange sanitarium. His broken leg will heal properly if he relaxes and enjoys the range of therapies available at the spa, says the spa director, Dr. Volmer.

Dane DeHaan premieres A Cure for Wellness

It should come as no surprise that the Cinema Society screening of A Cure for Wellness last night at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema drew a great crowd of film industry insiders and enthusiasts during New York Fashion Week. We asked Jason Isaacs if he was checking out any shows when we asked if he was watching a horror film directed by Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring). “Hell no,” said Isaacs. Against the protagonist Dane DeHaan, he plays the film’s lead villain. DeHaan said he had not seen anything this week when asked the same question. He said he was too busy promoting his movie.

The treatment progresses

During the course of the treatment, Lockhart begins to experience paranoia and hallucinates. Having been diagnosed as raving mad by Volmer, he is forcibly interned. Eventually, Lockhart agrees to internment and learns from another patient that the castle in which the spa is located was owned by a mad baron who wanted an heir of the purest blood. Thus, he married his own sister, who seemed to be sterile. He then experimented on the local peasants, but they rebelled and destroyed the castle. Having captured the baron’s wife, they discovered that she was pregnant, and tore the baby from her womb.

Discovers painstakingly

After learning the doctor uses eels to obtain an elixir enabling him to remain young forever, Lockhart painfully discovers that the good doctor is the baron still alive, who is using eels to obtain his elixir. As Lockhart explores the castle to investigate this sordid affair, he meets a young woman named Hannah, who is in fact the baron’s daughter. Due to her father’s elixir, she remains in a pubescent state. She falls in love with Lockart, and this will lead to the final confrontation and the castle’s downfall.

The film is magnificent

This is a beautiful film from a visual standpoint. Filmed on location at the Hohenzollern castle in Bisingen, as well as in two other medieval German towns, it all emanates opulence. However, the script is one of its weak points. An adaptation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the film starts off well enough. A notable detail is that one of the spa’s employees is seen reading this very novel in one scene. The story topples into a quagmire as soon as the baron/doctor Volmer’s background is revealed, and now fantasy/horror takes the high road. Toward the end of the film, with a vitriolic taste that recalls early death, it seems as if the director had lost all control over the story, which had begun with so much promise.