cureforwellnessposterStarring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Harry Groener

Directed by Gore Verbinski

Regency, out now

Gore Verbinski’s old-fashioned psychological horror movie is totally bonkers. A bloated Europudding of a beast, it’s Hammer by way of Argento, but maybe there’s enough visual splendour among the mayhem to keep you entertained.

No horror cliché is left out of this melange of a movie, that somehow manages to keep a straight face among the mayhem. It feels like it could have been made in the 70s, such is the naïveté of its crazy ideas, the saturated Technicolor of its picture postcard setting and audaciousness of its conceits. And yet its vintage feels even older, with nods to Dracula, AIP Poe movies or dubbed Italian giallo penny dreadfuls.

Dane DeHaan is an immediately unlikeable lead, a yuppie with a troubled past who has made his path in a cutthroat finance firm by cooking the books. He’s blackmailed by his bosses into bringing back a key employee from the firm (a welcome return by Buffy‘s Harry Groener) who is currently residing at an exclusive sanatorium (more like an insanatorium) for rich people at the foothills of the Alps. And so our young Jonathan Harker is soon on a train across Europe, getting lots of ‘you don’t want to go there –nobody ever leaves’ warnings. Heck, one child even draws the picture of a devil in the window condensation, but when does anyone follow sound advice in a horror film?

a-cure-for-wellnessEschewing the Borgo Pass for Swiss mountains, our protagonist is soon gazing up at a fairytale castle, poorly matted onto the top of the screen, having run into the sort of xenophobic punks en route they you’d normally only find in a 1980s Philippe Mora Howling movie. Initially barred from visiting the inmate because he’s outside of visiting hours, DeHaan finally meets Pembroke to find out he – like everyone else there –doesn’t want to leave. One particularly visceral car accident later involving a stag and DeHaan finds out that he too won’t be leaving any time soon.

What is the secret of the medicinal water that the patients are imbuing regularly throughout the day, and what is the strange hold that the spa and its staff holds over them? More importantly, who thought it was a good idea to have Jason Isaacs with a Germanic accent in charge – don’t they watch The OA on Netflix? Frankly, I can’t spoil this movie for you because having seen it to the end I have no idea what really happened. There’s giant eels in the water, sinister nurses, a grotesque caretaker who wheels bodies away in the night, male orderlies built like Bond villains, hidden rooms and characters who exist purely to provide plot exposition – that’s you, Celia Imrie.

Before you can cry ‘House of Usher’, there’s an all-consuming fire, giant portraits on the wall, a crypt – it literally follows a checklist of horror tropes. It’s also far too long – schlock like this should clock in at 1 hour 45, not 2 and 1/2 hours. I gave up on the number of endings, deciding I ultimately liked the penultimate one.

I feel that Verbinski is literate in his horror history, but by throwing so many elements so blatantly into this monster mash, pastiche has tripped into mockery. On the plus side, it looks gorgeous, the location setting is very apt and there’s a real sense of paranoia. But in a film where you have no empathy for the lead it’s really hard to care what happens as the plot threads unravel and the whole thing spirals inevitably to its fatalistic outcome.

Verdict: Mad as a box of frogs, or in this case, a tank of eels. They really don’t make them like this any more (rightly or wrongly) this throwback might just be the eelgood hit of the season. 5/10

Nick Joy