I belong to a faculty book club at my job, and just before classes ended, we finished off Jane Austen’s Emma. That inspired me to revisit the 2020 movie version, and I actually enjoyed it more the second time. But there was an actress in that movie, Mia Goth, who played the role of the naive and clumsy Harriet Smith. She had a look that was familiar to me, and I did look her up. It turns out she’s made a lot of horror movies from the looks of things, including this year’s X. Basically, it looks like every other role she’s been in are about as far removed from Harriet Smith as it may be possible to get. There’s nothing of Harriet, for example, in High Life. Basically, Mia Goth has some good range.
Then again, there may be a bit of Harriet in 2016’s A Cure for Wellness.
A financial services firm needs its CEO to come back to New York and do some work of some kind. The man, Pembroke (Harry Groener), has been staying at a reclusive and exclusive “wellness center” somewhere off in Switzerland. The board dispatches a young executive named Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) to bring him back. However, just getting there is difficult enough, and it takes Lockhart some time to even find Pembroke once he gets there despite the possible helpfulness of the center’s head guy, Dr. Heinrich Volmer (Jason Isaacs). Or not. Volmer insists that all the older folks at his center are all sick and in need of the care that his center, a system that involves the unique water supply found at the center. Lockhart just wants to find Pembroke and go. He does manage to find Pembroke and even convinces the CEO to temporarily return to New York, take care of the business, and then return to Switzerland.
But Lockhart’s departure takes a bad turn when the car he is riding in hits a deer. He wakes up three days later with a broken leg, back at the center and now partaking of the treatment himself. Volmer states that Lockhart is one of the sickest people he’s ever seen, and he should stay. Lockhart, for his part, would like a second opinion or a chance to call the office or even just to find out what’s going on. The other patients, particularly the mysterious, noticeably younger, and somewhat immature Hannah (Goth). Is there something in the water? What illness is Volmer actually treating? And is there a cure for it?
I gotta say, this one was rather creepy, at least at first. Director Gore Verbinski is someone I know best for a few Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and the general aesthetic does seem to fit there. The center, on the surface, doesn’t seem to be a place for evil. Everyone dresses in white and looks happy, but there’s something discomforting about it as Verbinski opts to do things like show closeups of mouths as old folks drink water, no one seems to be particularly bad but the help they offer seems more confining than helpful, and there’s just a disquieting air to the whole movie. Plus, something about DeHaan’s usual appearance does make him look like he at least needs a little more sleep or something.
That said, it did seem to run a bit long. Cut it by twenty to thirty minutes, and it would probably work better. There was also a lot of stuff that made me squirm a bit involving teeth, and that doesn’t really work for me even for a good horror movie. But this one, beyond the general tone and a solid villain performance from Isaacs, just didn’t work for me all that much. Despite the oddities in the movie, it somehow only really felt kinda average to me. It’s not bad, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it either.
Grade: C+
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