Once more with eel-ing...

Some movies you can see coming a mile off. Either it’s because the director’s a cack-handed muppet who’s idea of setting up their final act is somewhat akin to Wile E. Coyote holding up a sign for the audience to explain exactly what’s about to happen or it’s because they’ve taken Beauty and the Beast far too seriously in their youth and the whole “tale as old as time” thing is sat on their brain like some sort of leech forcing them to re-hash the same narrative over and over again. Now the more literary minded amongst you will likely be piping up that there are only really seven stories, narratively speaking, and so there are only so many different ways things can go. Granted; sterling work there, give yourself a pat on the back. I’m the one doing the smart-arse schtick around here though, so pipe down. 

Michael Bay’s Armageddon is an absolutely perfect example of how not to foreshadow things subtly. Quite aside from how ridiculous literally everything in that movie is from moment one there are two complete corkers in terms of telegraphing your third act: one glaring moment in the World’s Longest and Dullest Training Montage, the young upstart is pushing the limits of the drilling equipment in a swimming pool. “Don’t do that!” chides our grizzled veteran “You’ll break it and then the mission will fail and all life on Earth will be reduced to the consistency of a rich clam chowder”. True enough, young upstart is convinced it’ll work but o and behold! Nobody is surprised when it all goes pear shaped in the pool and the drill bit goes for a Burton. It was at this point anyone in the cinema who’d ever seen a movie before wondered collectively if the same thing was going to happen later on but the upstart saves the day by pushing things to the limits, ignoring the old ways and doing his own thing. The drill holds, the grizzled veteran admits a begrudging respect and life goes on. The other moment is when for some God-forsaken reason they put high calibre machine guns on the lunar rover. What the hell were they expecting up there other than for the one guy out of the crew who actually passes the astronauts to go crazy and start shooting at people? How the hell does Bay keep getting work? Fascinating and terrifying in equal measure.

On the other hand there are movies that defy any sort of predictions. Either because they’re really well done or because they’re so completely bat-shit crazy that anyone who tells you they know what’s going on is a bare-faced liar and should be locked in stocks in the town square and pelted with fruit. Predestination is the absolute pinnacle of that for me, and therefore the benchmark for everything weird in movies. It used to be Donnie Darko but frankly (pun intended) it’s been surpassed. A Cure For Wellness sort of sits uncomfortably in the middle of that. It almost feels like it wants to be all weird and twisty but just ends up a bit disjointed and much like many other movies of late in that it spends more time reminding me of films I’ve already seen than anything else. Only this time with added eels. We’ll get to that though.

The set-up is familiar enough; CEO of a big financial firm disappears off to a health resort in Austria, sends a creepy handwritten letter to his right hand man who promptly has a heart attack and dies (which is either really convenient or inconvenient depending on whether you’re the plot or the guy with the bum ticker) so another one of his underlings gets dispatched to bring him back so he can sign off on some paperwork or something. Seen it a million times right? Well sort of; it’s a bit convoluted but it gets our “hero” out into the jaws of potential peril so I guess it’s done its job. What follows is then a series of set-ups for red herrings, false flags and other diversions designed to get you chasing your own tail. The reason I can’t work out if I enjoyed it is that so many of those threads just go nowhere and there is some really ropey foreshadowing going on.

Lockhart, our plucky hero, is only stuck at the retreat because a deer decides to launch itself antler-first into his car causing a spectacular crash, a few days’ worth of coma that he just brushes off like a pro and just the one leg in a full cast. Cue horrible foreshadowing moment number one when the creepy head doctor tells him to drink the water. Not just “water” but “the water”. So straight away we know something is up with the water and that something is probably going to be fairly pivotal late on. No mystery, no drama, just a Wile E Coyote sign saying “It’s the water”. So he potters about a bit having hallucinations trying to track down his boss, having weird flashbacks about his dementia suffering Mum painting ballerinas then dying and leaving him the one she says is dreaming as an inheritance (horrible foreshadowing moment number two. Obviously he was out of the will, but she did leave something to the plot. How generous). People are creepy, we’re not sure whether or not he’s imagining everything, it’s probably a cult, there’s a weird girl following him around, there are eels literally everywhere; in toilet cisterns, in the pipes, in the isolation tanks, forcibly pumped into the stomachs of the residents so the doctor with no face who may or may not be a 300 year old Baron can extract their life essence to counteract the toxic properties of the drinking water which also happened to give unnatural long life to the almost 300 year old incestuous bastard daughter of the Baron’s sister who was removed from her womb and dunked into the magic water while her mother was burning at the stake… wait what? That’s possibly the craziest sentence I’ve written this week, but I swear that’s what I think the plot was.

Somebody somewhere couldn’t decide to make a ghost story, a cult story or a mystical eels story and ended up with the script equivalent of what happens if you leave kids unsupervised with Play-Doh. Starts out looking fresh, ends up a terrible misshapen and discoloured blob. I think this might be the perfect way to sum it up: Lockhart gets pumped full of eels, gets some of his juice drained and then sort of fits in to the whole “we love it here” crowd. He then twiddles his Mum’s ballerina (phrasing) for a bit and all of a sudden he’s back rampaging through the catacombs and burning down the Phantom of the Opera’s subterranean rape palace. The bad guy does get his come-uppance for trying to force himself on his own daughter in the form of a shovel literally in his disfigured little face before being eaten by eels, so there is a positive message behind the gratuitous tit shots I guess.

All that being said it’s not the worst movie I’ve seen. It’s not as clever as Shutter Island or as plain weird as Southland Tales but it had potential which was sadly never realised. Points for effort and for inevitably having the on-set motto “If in doubt, add more eels”.