A Cure for Wellness stars Dane DeHaan as a surly financial executive trapped in a sanitarium.

A Cure for Wellness lives up to its title: It made me feel sick.

The horror thriller comes from director Gore Verbinski, whose eclectic resume includes the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the wonderfully eccentric animated comedy Rango, and the first American remake of The Ring. His latest marks a return to warped psychological fantasy, but it’s not a smooth re-entry.

The movie oscillates wildly from black comedy to torture porn without finding a coherent balance, and the story defies logic. At 146 minutes, it’s also far too long. The central performance from the blank-eyed Dane DeHaan couldn’t sustain a movie half that length. A gratuitous rape scene leaves an even more sour aftertaste.

Fans of the USA show Mr. Robot might feel at home in the movie’s opening minutes, which establish protagonist Lockhart (DeHaan) as a professionally successful, emotionally stunted financial executive enmeshed in corporate drudgery. The movie quickly plays its hand when a young boy sitting across from Lockhart on the train draws devil horns on his window, invoking a genre cliche both tired and unnecessary.

Soon Lockhart’s stern bosses send him to a remote sanitarium in the Swiss Alps to retrieve Pembroke, a fellow executive who abruptly decamped from the United States without signing a key agreement. Lockhart arrives in a rush, but the sanitarium’s employees refuse to grant access. A few minutes later, a deer crosses paths with Lockhart’s cab ride back to the hotel and sends the vehicle hurtling down a ravine. When Lockhart wakes up, he’s in the sanitarium, under the care of its icy director Volmer (Jason Isaacs).

By this point, the movie seems to hope that Lockhart’s immediately obvious peril will make the next two hours compelling, but the gamble doesn’t pay off. DeHaan isn’t appealing enough to invest depth in Lockhart, who’s consistently a cipher and inconsistently an oblivious rube, despite frequently voicing suspicions.

Indeed, there’s plenty to find suspicious. A troubled teenage girl murmurs a eerie ditty while strolling the ruins of a church. The sanitarium’s patients tell tales of the building’s troubled past. Lockhart finds a revolting insect in his water, then shrugs and keeps drinking more, complaining throughout that all patients do in the sanitarium is drink water. (Spoiler: Drinking the water is bad.)

At first these absurdities are amusing, even intriguing, thanks to the haunting atmospherics in Verbinski’s compositions. But as they pile up, the fun drains out, leaving a hodgepodge of recycled tropes, meaningless diversions and hollow treatises about the pursuit of youthful perfection. Lockhart’s mission, never particularly interesting, grows less urgent as the movie goes on.

And then there’s that rape scene. It’s grisly, and the movie seems to think it’s funny, but I didn’t laugh. The victim’s presence in the movie felt vague throughout, and the twists that lead to the heinous act flew far over my head. Verbinski scrapes together some enchanting imagery, but the hollow sloppiness of Justin Haythe’s script sends it, like Lockhart, down a one-way path to insanity.

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A Cure for Wellness
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Written by Justin Haythe
Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
146 minutes
Rated R for disturbing violent content and images, sexual content including an assault, graphic nudity, and language
Opens today at area theaters