A Cure for Wellness

Saw A Cure for Wellness, another film (like yesterday's Shutter Island) about a spooky psychological institute and a protagonist who all the doctors say is crazy.  This time it's a hydrotherapy institute in the mountains of Switzerland where the waters have healing and healthful properties.  The protagonist is a hot-shot business-boy who is searching for his company's CEO for obscure, business-y reasons.  The film is not bad but very over-long and as focused on style over substance as a Tim Burton film.

The film is very pretty.  There's lots of great, eerie little touches.  A woman cuts up newspaper crosswords and pastes them into her own puzzles, a pretty girl in a gauzy dress, standing on the battlements of a castle, fat women swimming through water like fish in a tank.  It reminded me a lot of Tim Burton's alternately subdued and flamboyant images.  There's a fair bit of gore and violent scenes as well however and I found all of that very off-putting.

It really is over-long however.  It reminded me the most of a video-game, pushing the main character from check-point to check-point, showing days passing in an out-of-character montage before giving you control back.  There's papers that must be collected and scoured for clues, often circled in red pen for some reason.  The whole thing seems lumpy and over-stuffed in a very video-game-ish way to me.

The film is not bad, but it's strange. There's a lot of pieces that don't make sense except in a tonal sort of way.  We establish that the main character is an ex-smoker, for example, but this is only important for a scene where he lights a cigarette and sees something spooky.  Why waste our time like this?  There's other times where this sort of dreamy, abruptness works, but sometimes I feel like we're suffering from sub-plots unevenly cut out of the film.  It either needs to be longer or shorter, I think.

Anyway, it's a style over substance kind of film.  A sort of Tim Butron-ization of Shutter Island.  It's not bad, although I frankly think it would have been a better video game.  The imagery is beautiful, the tone is sinister, the old mansion and accented orderlies are great - just start it with plenty of time to spare.