Gothika (*1/2)
review by Jon Waterman

A mental institution’s top psychiatrist heads home one night. Out of nowhere a girl appears in the middle of the road before her. She crashes her car in a ditch to avoid hitting the young woman. The next thing she knows, she’s back in the asylum – as a patient. Now she has to convince her former coworkers that she doesn’t belong there (at least not on that side of the glass cell) and that she didn’t kill her husband. But more importantly, she must convince herself.

Halle Berry does a good job with the role. It would have been very easy to just “phone it in” and give the bad horror performance we’re used to getting from the genre. Robert Downey Jr. also shows more thought into what he does and says. But the big standout was Penelope Cruz. Her time on screen was relatively limited, but she showed the most range. Halle basically went from afraid to angry and sometimes both at the same time. Cruz got to play the wise ass, the maniac, the victim and the teacher. Every time her character showed up, it took on a new meaning and personality. The only real sore spot in the cast was John Carroll Lynch. He hammed it up and took it upon himself to bring that suspense genre-acting stereotype back to the forefront.

Despite the above average performances, not much else makes the movie stand out. The storyline had problems. Writer Sebastian Gutierrez tried to cram a bit too much in at the end to wrap everything up. It all got to be too crowded and laughable. The film was fine when it was just about Berry trying to figure out if she actually was in her right mind (even though that got tiresome). Then it had to add all this other stuff that I won’t go into. It all seemed like a cheap way out of a plot that started getting redundant.

The film made use of camera tricks to some extent, but luckily they were limited. The music brought nothing of interest. The whole structure screamed typical to me. Swell the music and then stop it. Bring in something to scare in a second afterwards. There really was only one scare in the whole movie and I certainly don’t remember those musical conventions being involved. If a movie is marketed as a scary-type movie, then put a few more legitimate scares in there for us.

The film had some potential. It could have broken away from the conventions of the typical thriller and become more of a think piece. All the normal moves were there. The audience was given no credit. This could have been a great psychological film, but no one (not even the characters) was allowed to analyze anything. We were not meant to try to figure out what was going on in Halle’s mind. That seems like a big mistake to me. Very average fare. Don’t rush to see it.

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