November 21, 2003 | By assuming
the lead role in the absurdly muddled Gothika, Halle Berry
may have done more to prove the existence of an “Oscar curse” than
any actress since Louise Fletcher (remember her?) segued from Milos
Forman's acclaimed One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest to John Boorman's notorious Exorcist II: The
Heretic .
Not unlike Boorman's folly, Gothika is a brazenly illogical
and inadvertently comical horror show, the kind of anything-goes mishmash
that prompts you to suspect that key transitional scenes were left on
the cutting-room floor. Indeed, the continuity here is so ragged, and
the plot twists so arbitrary, you might wonder whether the projectionist
accidentally spliced together reels from two or three different movies.
Directed with visual flair and narrative fumbling by French filmmaker
Mathieu Kassovitz ( La Haine, The Crimson Rivers ), this sputtering
misfire revolves around Miranda Grey (Berry), a stern-faced psychiatrist
employed at Woodward Penitentiary, which apparently is a dumping ground
for the criminally insane. At first, Dr. Grey's most challenging patient
is a deeply troubled young woman (Penelope Cruz in a really tatty wig)
who raves about being raped by Satan. Not too long into the movie, however,
the psychiatrist gets a dose of her own medicine, so to speak, when she's
arrested and incarcerated for a horrific crime -- the brutal murder of
her husband, Woodward warden Douglas Grey (Charles S. Dutton) – she has
no memory of committing.
Screenwriter Sebastian Gutierrez has cobbled together a plot that has
something to do with the vengeful spirit of a murdered teen-age girl
who sporadically bursts into flames, and something else to do a sex-and-sadism
conspiracy that plays like a rerun of Law and Order: Special Victims
Unit . Robert Downey Jr. and Bernard Hill appear as Woodward co-workers,
but they're so obviously intended as red herrings that it's impossible
to take them seriously as likely suspects. Meanwhile, the real culprit
walks around and more or less bellows: “I'm the mad killer! I'm the mad
killer!” Eventually, other characters take notice.
Judging from the final scene – which, heaven
help us, indicates the possibility of a sequel – Gothika is set in some parallel universe
where demonic possession is an acceptably credible defense for anyone
charged with manslaughter. It's also a place where security is, at best,
a sometime thing at prisons for the criminally insane, and purportedly
intelligent heroines continue to drive getaway cars long after it's obvious
that the brakes are out of whack.
Berry struggles to retain some shards of dignity as she dutifully plods
through the contrivances of Gothika. But she's hard-pressed
to generate interest while the audience is distracted by glaring inconsistencies
of tone, character development and, no kidding, architectural design.
Some Woodward cells are ultra-modern glass-and-steel enclosures; others
are dank hellholes with peeling paint and flickering fluorescent bulbs.
Hey, whatever works.
No cheap trick or visual cliché is beneath
the perpetrators of Gothika .
To indicate an air of free-floating spookiness throughout the haunted halls
of Woodward Penitentiary, they simply use 30-watt bulbs where most reasonable
folks would normally place 100-watt illumination. Insert joke about dim
bulbs here.