For Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), there is no time for anything else but business and getting ahead. So he's more than a little irritated that it's he's that been entrusted (or, more accurately, blackmailed) by his superiors to go retrieve a higher-up at his business from a mysterious foreign facility promising its visitors some sort of cure. Lockhart just wants to get in and out of this place as quickly as possible, which becomes complicated first when the man he's been sent to retrieve refuses to leave and then further muddled when Lockhart breaks his leg in a car accident. Now he's stuck in this compound, which may have more sinister going-ons than the personnel are letting on...
Easily the highlights of A Cure For Wellness can be found whenever it drops all pretenses of being much more than just an opportunity for director Gore Verbinski and screenwriter Justin Haythe (reuniting with Verbinski after they worked together on the severely underwhelming mess The Lone Ranger) to film a bunch of really really really disturbing torture horror scenes. They're grisly and hard to watch but also well-filmed, with no quick cuts away to distract from the carnage transpiring to our lead character. There's also a depraved glee to be found, I'll freely admit, in seeing just how Verbinski and crew manage to make sure the newest scene of gruesomeness tops the last. Things get both weird and icky, to put it gently.
However, a problem quickly emerges for A Cure For Wellness in that those twisted horror-heavy scenes are actually a fairly small part of the entire movie. Much of the story is connective tissue between the more creative portions of the plot that involve Lockhart trying to figure out the mystery of what's really going on here in the facility, a mystery that's, honestly, quite tedious at times to watch. There's no real unexpected surprises to be had in terms of what Lockhart ends up discovering about the facility and all the various pieces and clues he discovers throughout the story that lead him to supposedly important revelations regarding what's really happening here basically come out of nowhere. It feels like the movie is just making stuff up as it goes along in the worst way possible.
Watching Lockhart do the Nancy Drew investigation routine whilst trying to figure out if the suspicious acting facility is really doing suspicious activity is nowhere near as entertaining as the gruesome horror stuff, and unfortunately, watching Lockhart snoop around takes up the majority of the running time, very much to the films overall detriment. It might help if Lockhart really worked as a character, but instead he's this extremely simply caricature at best, an overly busy, easily agitated (in his introductory scene, he's seen on a train snapping at a conductor checking everyone's tickets for no reason), the kind of character that would actually fit fine as the lead of a horror movie whose sole purpose as to see bad or painful things inflicted on him. He's less fine in the role of a character one is supposed to actually be engaged by for a long duration of time.
A Cure For Wellness has a story that's frequently a mess, especially in the third act where the lead character has two supposedly profound changes-of-heart regarding the facility he's entrapped in that come and go too quickly to leave much of an impact. That third act also comes with a climax that's 50% the good kind of icky and 50% the bad kind of icky. All of that being said, it still remains a watchable affair with a sadistic spirit that's hard to deny in its best moments. Plus, the whole movie is absolutely gorgeous looking thanks to some fantastic production design and exemplary cinematography by Bohan Bazelli that places the camera in certain positions (on the side of a moving train or looking at the reflection in a stuffed animal) that allow the viewer to see the action on-screen from a unique perspective. If only the movie itself had found more moments of actual intrigue, or even just more bits of gross-out carnage, to pair all of those strong visual elements with, A Cure For Wellness could have been more than just an intermittently interesting experiment. Some proper and a plot structure that actually fits the type of story its trying to tell (framing this all as a big mystery movie is a majorly wrong-headed decision given how obvious everything is from the get-go) could have really helped cure what ails A Cure For Wellness.
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