A Cure for Wellness

An ambitious young Wall Street shark (Dane De Haan) travels to the Swiss Alps to extract one of his company’s honchos from a secluded health spa run by a mysterious, vaguely sinister doctor (Jason Isaacs). When a car crash makes the young man a patient there, the sinister vibes he gets from everyone become more threatening by the hour. Make no mistake, the script by Justin Haythe and director Gore Verbinski is a total crock and doesn’t make sense even on its own wacky terms; Haythe and Verbinski came up with only half a story, finally resorting to visual echoes of movies from Hitchcock’s Spellbound to Last Year at Marienbad and Mystery of the Wax Museum. And yet it’s almost hypnotically beautiful and you can’t look away, right up to the off-the-wall ending. Verbinski delivers the goods on that score. J.L.