#94: Winchester
Guns n’ ghosts can’t live up to Dame Helen Mirren
This review was originally posted to Twitter on April 28, 2019.
Initial release: February 2, 2018
Director: Michael and Peter Spierig
You ever see an actor in a movie and wonder to yourself, “Why them? Why this movie?” It’s hard to imagine Dame Helen Mirren in a movie like Winchester, it almost seems beneath her, but she certainly brings her A game to it. That’s not to say it’s a bad film. While it likes its jump scares like most other horror movies of the past decade and change, it still manages to be a creepily effective film at times, coming off as a sort of period-piece Sixth Sense, though without nearly as good an ending.
It’s April of 1906 and a psychoanalyst, Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke, who was John Connor in Terminator: Genisys) is hired by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company to assess Sarah Winchester (Mirren), the eccentric widow of the company’s founder and a major shareholder of the company. It seems Lady Winchester has been building a mansion in San Jose for years, with work going round-the-clock constantly adding new rooms. It’s all for the sake of the so-called “Winchester curse” — the house is haunted by victims of Winchester rifles, with the intent of containing them.
This is all historical, by the way — there really is a Winchester mansion, which the film was shot in, and the widow really did build it for that reason. It’s ripe material for a good old fashioned ghost story.
And a good old fashioned ghost story it is, as Price increasingly comes to realize that it’s not his laudanum addiction making him see things, and learns how his relationship with death, in particular the death of his wife, tie into all this.
It’s a good yarn, with elements of possession, and themes of death and rebuilding. The house itself is gorgeously weird with its almost organic construction and maze-like layout, lovingly portrayed in all its strange, haunted-house charm by the Spiergi brothers.
Unfortunately, it all comes unraveled as the protagonists battle a particularly malevolent ghost, who’s got a serious grudge against the Winchester name. Several elements come together a bit too tidily, and the film’s reliance on shopworn ghost tropes comes to a head here. It’s implied that the fury of this ghost was enough to cause the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which shatters the house and turns it into a battleground for the final confrontation; it’s a neat touch, but not enough to make up for how pedestrian the ending is.
The soundtrack also has its pedestrian moments, with scare chords at appropriate moments to remind the audience that this film is supposed to be scary; in between, however, it’s a moody, strings-heavy atmospheric work that reminded me a little of the original Resident Evil.
It’s not the worst ghost movie you’ll ever see, and it’s worth it just for Mirren as the earnest, spiritual Lady Winchester, but for a movie about such an iconic haunted house the house itself isn’t much more than set dressing, taking a backseat to a contrived haunting plot.
