Gore Verbinski’s sanatorium is the handsomest haunted house in years, all green lawns, white tiles and blue water, and for an hour we were happy to be locked in. Then the film keeps going, gives away its own answer, and ends somewhere cheap.
Gore Verbinski has made a 146-minute gothic about a wellness spa in the Swiss Alps, and the length is the first thing to say about it, because it is the thing you will feel. Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), a young executive, is sent to fetch his firm’s chief executive, Pembroke (Harry Groener), home from the place before a merger goes through. He arrives, is turned away, crashes his car on the mountain road and wakes three days later as a patient with his leg in plaster. That is a good set-up for a ninety-minute film. Verbinski and his writer Justin Haythe have decided it will do for two and a half hours, and it will not.
What they have built is the handsomest asylum we have seen in some time. Eve Stewart’s production design gives the castle white-tiled bathing halls, brass pipework, iron steam cabinets and an old wing nobody is meant to enter, and Bojan Bazelli photographs all of it square-on and symmetrical, patients in white robes laid out across green lawns like teeth. The water, which everyone drinks from blue bottles, is lit so that it glows. Jenny Beavan’s robes and bathing caps make the inmates look like one body with many heads. Benjamin Wallfisch writes a music-box lullaby that the patients hum back to each other, and it is the one idea in the score, used well.
Jason Isaacs runs the place as Volmer, and he is the best thing in it. He plays the director as a soft-spoken, courteous man who answers every question fully and tells you nothing, and he never once raises his voice. Celia Imrie, as a fellow patient called Victoria Watkins, does the crossword, drinks the water and passes on the castle’s history, and her two or three scenes with DeHaan are the only ones with any dryness in them. Mia Goth plays Hannah, the pale girl on the bicycle who has been a patient longer than anyone, as a child in a woman’s body, which is what the film asks of her and, later, the reason we grew uneasy with it.
DeHaan is harder to warm to, and we think that is on purpose. Lockhart arrives sweating and grey, a man who looks ill before anyone has treated him, and he is rude to everyone. Haythe gives him a dead father and a mother in a home and then forgets both. He is a man to whom things happen, which is fine in a haunted-house picture, but at this length we wanted a reason to be on his side, and the script never offers one.
There is a scene in a dentist’s chair, about an hour in, that we will not describe except to say that it involves a drill and that we looked away. We were then slightly ashamed, because it was the first thing in a long while to make us sit up, and a horror film should not need a drill to wake us. The sensory-deprivation tank, with its eels, is better. Bazelli shoots it from above, a man floating in black water while something moves beneath him, and the dread comes from the framing rather than from anything jumping out.
The trouble is everything between those moments. Pete Beaudreau and Lance Pereira cut the film as though no corridor could be walked only once, and Lockhart is forever creeping down the same passage with the same torch. The mystery is one most viewers will have solved by the end of the first hour, and the film then spends a second hour watching Lockhart fail to. Verbinski has frightened us before. The Ring, in 2002, built its dread by holding things back, and it did not need 146 minutes to do so. Here he has every resource going and uses all of it, repeatedly.
The final half hour goes somewhere we will not describe, but we will say that the tone turns lurid, the castle’s history is acted out rather than hinted at, and the use made of Goth’s character left us uncomfortable in a way the film did not seem to notice. Most critics have landed near where we have: admiration for the surfaces, impatience with everything under them. See it for the baths, the lawns and Isaacs, and see it at home, where you can stop at the hour mark and come back to it in the morning. The 18 certificate is earned, mostly in the dentist’s chair.
