Summary
Inspired by one of the world’s “most haunted” houses, what should have been a simple horror tale gets lost in its own corridors.
The 161 room Winchester Mystery House is the Californian icon borne of the eccentric mind of heiress Sarah Lockwood Winchester. Its eclectic designs and reported haunting and has inspired appearances in everything from Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing comics to Shinji Mikami’s The Evil Within video game. Australia’s Spierig Brothers set their latest spookfest within its labyrinthine innards, but they get a little lost between floorboards.
In 1906, San Francisco psychiatrist Eric Price (Jason Clarke) is sent by the Winchester firearms company to assess the mental state of Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren). Construction continues around the clock on the titular house. As Price battles his own mental demons with booze and laudanum, he must slowly come to terms with the notion that very real spirits may be seeking vengeance on the Winchester clan.
From the opening shot, a top-down pan across the sprawling house, the retro title splash lets us know that brothers Michael and Peter Spierig have some old-school horror in mind. The basic plotting is simplicity itself, with a century’s worth of Winchester Mystery House stories providing ample fodder for scares. However, most of these familiar frights are merely creepy children and figures jumping out from the shadows, accompanied by an orchestral blast through the Dolby surround speakers.
Even so, this should have been enough for a supernatural thriller, but the Spierigs try to cover too much ground. There’s an odd bit of commentary on the gun debate, especially timely given the tragic events in Parkland, Florida shortly after the US release of the film. Mirren’s character, who keep meticulous records of all the victims of Winchester products, concedes that guns can be used for good and bad purposes. Yet the ultimately centrist piece still seems to follow the view that only a “good guy with a gun” can stop a force of evil.
In this maelstrom of morality, entire characters and threads get shuttered off in a dusty room. Sarah Snook, as Winchester relative Marian Marriot, appears to only be there to explain the presence of a possessed redheaded child. He in turn is used as a cross between Damien Thorn and Regan MacNeil in a mashup of all the horror tropes. It’s almost as if every door in the household contains a terror from a different movie. (It is nice to see Bruce Spence turn up though).
As the final act descends into a free-for-all spookfest, WINCHESTER loses faith in its own premise and overbudens the denouement. Like the Winchester House itself, the screenplay from Tom Vaughan and The Spierig Brothers madly scrambles construct extra scenes even if they don’t join up with the existing framework. Piling on preposterous pivots, and ridiculous reveals that don’t stand up to close scrutiny, it doesn’t really work as an atmospheric thriller or even a straight ghost story.
2018 | Australia, US | DIRECTOR: The Spierig Brothers | WRITERS: Tom Vaughan and The Spierig Brothers | CAST: Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, Sarah Snook | DISTRIBUTOR: StudioCanal(AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 16 February 2018 (AUS)
