A Cure For Wellness * * * 1/2

I'm not feeling well.  Must be those eels I had.

A Cure For Wellness is a little bit computer game, a little bit David Lynch, a little bit Sleeping Beauty, a little bit Nazi type experiments, a little bit Thomas Mann's the Magic Mountain, plus a few other references (hello Marathon Man). And at 142 minutes it's a little bit too long.

     It’s a modern day goth horror that announces early in the piece that we are sick.  People today are greedy, selfish, sickeningly ambitious and  avaricious.  We are not the people we are meant to be. Persuaded by this message, a senior executive from a New York hedge fund goes away to a Swiss Sanatorium to  get better.  In his absence his firm decide to merge with another firm. They need him to sign papers, so they send a junior executive to Switzerland to get him back.

    After driving through a hostile village, he finds himself at a remote castle in the Swiss Alps with a most uncooperative staff. Circumstances mean he has to stay there himself and soon he begins to discover all is not quite right,but with his visions of eels he can't be sure if he is going nuts or if there is something else going on.

    There is a sordid legend about the family who owned the property and when he meets a young woman who is interned there he begins to suspect a continuation of the legend.

     Then it all gets pushed too far and it changes from an interesting story to something silly and predictable with mad doctors, mad cures, beautiful crazy girl, sadistic ward staff, mutants and megalomaniacs.  But at this stage we are happy to switch our brains off, (along with everyone involved in the project) and  go along for the ride through dungeons, laboratories, vile experiments, humans in oversize test tubes, right through to the predictable “burning down the house” conclusion.