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Gothika

2003, Movie, R, 97 mins

Gothika: Review

GOTHIKA
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A gloomy-doomy ghost story that gets off to a creepy start and then spirals into flat-out preposterousness, French actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz's English-language debut features Halle Berry in the kind of bravura role for which actresses claw out each other's eyes. As brilliant criminal psychologist Dr. Miranda Grey, she starts out on top of the world: She's beautiful, highly respected and happily married to her boss, Dr. Douglas Grey (Charles S. Dutton). One dark-and-stormy-night fender bender later, she's a patient at her former place of employment, the spooky Woodward Penitentiary for Women. When she asks for her husband, she is told that he's dead, then accused of having hacked him up with an ax. No one believes Miranda is innocent: Not her lawyer (Dorian Harewood); not her doctor, flirty former colleague Pete Graham (Robert Downey Jr.); not Sheriff Ryan (John Carroll Lynch), her late husband's best friend since childhood; and certainly not the other patients. Miranda doesn't help her case by insisting she remembers nothing about that night three days earlier, except that the storm forced her to take a detour over a small bridge, where she nearly mowed down a bloodied, traumatized young woman standing in the middle of the road. But no one's found any sign of a girl, and when Miranda identifies her as the subject of a photo belonging to Dr. Phil Parsons (Bernard Hill), another former colleague, her credibility is further damaged. The picture is of his teenage daughter, Rachel (Kathleen Mackey), who committed suicide by jumping off that isolated bridge four years ago. Fiercely rational Miranda doesn't believe in ghosts, but ghosts clearly believe in her: Rachel has chosen to torment Miranda with the enigmatic message "Not Alone," and uncovering the cause of the unquiet spirit's misery may be the only way Miranda can clear herself. Berry hurls herself into Miranda's humiliations with the same commitment she brought to her Oscar-winning performance in MONSTER'S BALL (2001), gamely enduring bad hair, ill-fitting hospital clothes and hollow-eyed makeup. But as Sebastian Gutierrez's script careens from hackneyed endangered-woman situations to loony implausibility and Kassovitz piles up the scary movie cliches, it becomes increasingly difficult to remain absorbed in Miranda's noir nightmare. And as the story loses its grip, your mind is free to toss up suspense-killing questions like 'Why are tormented ghosts always so cryptic about what they want?' No good comes of such mental meanderings, and the film's spell dissipates completely well before it's over. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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