Mia Goth

A CURE FOR WELLNESS
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Certificate 18
☆☆☆

WHEN high-flying banker Pembroke (Harry Groener) decides not to return from a Swiss health spa and instead leaves his colleagues with a looming financial crisis to deal with, hot-shot youngster Lockhart (Dane DeHaan on great form) is despatched to retrieve him.

But as soon as he arrives, things are not what they seem. On his way to the spooky mansion in the Alps, nearby villagers who seem to have come straight from Frankenstein, mix a hearty disdain for the spa on the hill with a suggested knowledge that what goes on there isn’t exactly the sort of stuff you’d get on the NHS.

A car crash en route means Lockhart becomes a patient instead of a saviour, his manoeuvrability curtailed by a full leg plaster. And then, as he tries to persuade his boss that it’s time to stop taking the waters and head home, he becomes the subject for “treatment” himself by blond smoothie head doc Volmer (Jason Isaacs, excellent as an evil Dr Kildare) and his pristine-looking hench people.

This is a classy horror, a film that plays on ideas of perceived truths, of trusting your intuition, and layers on an intense sense of claustrophobia.

Director Gore (Pirates of the Caribbean) Verbinski looks like he has borrowed imagery from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – there are long corridors, pale-faced weirdos who may or may not actually be there, a bath scene that recalls Jack Nicholson opening a door onto a woman coyly peering over a bath tub rim and the horrible fear of not being able to escape from a large, remote building.

It also has a moment that is as horrific as Laurence Olivier’s Nazi dentist in Marathon Man – truly wince-making. This is slick stuff.