Review: Gothika (2003)

IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards

 

GOTHIKA

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz

Rated R, 95 minutes

 

     It was a dark and stormy night at the asylum for the criminally insane...

     The opening of Gothika pretty much sets the tone for this creepy
supernatural thriller-shocker starring Halle Berry as a prison psychologist who
wakes to find herself trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare on the wrong side of
the bars.  Dr. Miranda Gray (Berry) has just wrapped up work for the day with
one of her more unsettling patients, Chloe Sava (Penelope Cruz), who raves that
she is being raped in her cell by the devil.

     With thunder crashing and lightning flashing and the prison lights
flickering and failing like the championship hopes of your favorite team,
Miranda discusses the case in traditional cinematopsychobabble with the
facility's director, Dr. Douglas Gray (Charles S. Dutton), who turns out to be
her husband.  "Chloe's mind runs on one track," he advises her, to which she
quips "Well my mind's running on empty."  After he leaves, she fends off some
harmless flirtation from staff colleague Dr. Pete Graham (Robert Downey Jr.)
and heads home through one of those downpours that confound the best intentions
of windshield wipers.

     A washed-out road sends her on a detour, where she swerves to avoid a
white-clad girl standing so stock-still in the middle of the road that she
could be a cardboard cut-out.   When Miranda climbs unhurt out of the ditch
where she's crashed, and approaches the girl to see if she's all right, the
girl spontaneously combusts, and Miranda reels away in glowing horror.  

     And rightly so.  When she wakes up three days later in shackles and behind
the bars of her own institution, she's informed that her husband is dead, and
that she is an axe murderer.  As her husband was the popular head of the prison
psychiatric staff, and the best friend of the local sheriff (John Carroll Lynch
of Fargo) to boot, everyone seems to hold this little slip against her.  

     So the familiar game is on.  The falsely accused heroine (because come on,
do we really believe Halle Berry could be an axe murderer?) has but the
remainder of a 95-minute movie to escape and prove her innocence.  What really
happened?  Is she crazy?  Is she possessed?  Does she see dead people?  "I'm a
rational person, I don't believe in ghosts," she says; then adds, forlornly,
"But they believe in me."

     And who wouldn't?  Halle Berry is a beautiful, talented actress.  Here she
has to do a lot of wide-eyed terror and screaming, most memorably in a group
shower with a few dozen naked crazy women who flee toward the camera in an
hysterical stampede.  She also bounces off walls, and holds her breath
impressively under water.  But frankly, it's not the sort of challenge with
which an Oscar winner makes a career move.

     Casting overkill may be one of the reasons why this entertaining, mildly
scary horror flick has been lambasted by critics.  Berry's costar is Robert
Downey Jr., who when he's not in jail or rehab is one of America's best actors.
 His name in a movie's credits runs up a flag of anticipation.  But this is far
from his best work.  He leans too much on his charming wise guy persona, except
when he should be in his understanding doctor mode, at which point he gets
belligerent and refuses to listen to Miranda.  And this with a woman who a few
days earlier was a respected colleague, good friend, and potential lover.

     The move is so full of those maddening horror movie "why doesn't
he/she/they" moments that to list them would read like an Oscar acceptance
speech.  The answer, of course, is always the same: because if people (and
spirits) behaved logically in these movies, they'd be over in fifteen minutes. 
But you do grow impatient with these frighteningly powerful entities from the
spirit world who can unlock a jail cell or hurl a full-grown person across a
room, but can't manage to scrawl a simple declarative sentence in blood on a
wall.  

     This is the first English language movie from French actor/director
Mathieu Kassovitz (he directed La Haine and starred opposite Audrey Tatou in
Amelie.)  He does an earnest job with the genre conventions here, wrapping the
proceedings in atmospheric darkness, splattering walls with blood, punctuating
it all with screams and boo! moments and lacing everything together with scary
music.  There are a few possible suspects among the trusted authority figures. 
Gothika is several chills short of classic horror, and its underdeveloped story
is strewn with silliness, but it will get the job done if you're in the mood
for a few screams.

     "You can't trust someone who thinks you're crazy," Chloe tells Miranda in
their therapy session in the first scene, and it is a warning which Miranda has
ample reason to remember as her nightmare unfolds.  As she begins to remember
more of what happened on that fateful dark and stormy night, she may just find
herself becoming one of them.

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X-Language: en
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