"Gothika" (2003, Mathieu Kassovitz, Dark Castle Entertainment, Warner Bros. Pictures, Columbia Pictures) is a film about a psychiatrist who wakes up to find herself a patient in the mental hospital she works at.
Dr. Miranda Grey (Halle Berry) works at Woodward Penitentiary as a Criminal Psychiatrist. She is working with several disturbed and violent women including Chloe Sava (Penélope Cruz). She's also the wife of Dr. Douglas Grey (Charles S. Dutton) who runs the facility, and has an apparent friendship-but-nothing-more relationship with her colleague Dr. Pete Graham (Robert Downey Jr.) - much to the latter's disappointment.
On a stormy night, Dr. Grey crashes her car on a bridge while narrowly missing hitting a young girl standing in the road. When the Dr. approaches the girl to check if she's ok she bursts into flames. Miranda doesn't remember anything else until she wakes up as a patient at Woodward herself and Pete breaks the news to her that she apparently went home and brutally murdered Douglas.
Miranda spends the rest of the film slowly piecing together her memory with the help of a vengeful spirit and some pretty inefficient security in the hospital. What she finds out shakes her worldview and it's probably for the best that she'd already dispatched of Douglas.
The film suffers from a lot of things that aren't its fault. The main one being it's just another early 2000s teen-aimed horror with that annoying blue tinged hue over every scene. But there remain some gaping plot holes (really? Pete just pulls some strings and she's kept at her previous place of work? I don't think so) and just too much going on in the plot. It's like they made a few storyboards and decided to mash it all together; crooked cops, crooked doctors, malpractice, ghosts, murder, torture porn, revenge, amnesia, sexual deviants getting access to patients without (supposedly) anyone knowing, misrepresented mental health patients.... you name it, it's in here. It's a bit of a mess plot-wise.
One of my main gripes with the film is its criminal(-ly insane) underuse of its talented cast. Halle Berry as the protagonist gets a fair share of screen time but most of her time is spent screaming and/or being sedated so her character isn't given much depth outside of her initial intro as overworked psychiatrist who likes to swim. As the film moves on she gets to deliver a more proactive role and starts to do her own sleuthing, but ghostly possession, or not, I doubt that she would be set free at the end of the film, having, you know, murdered a guy! RDJ manages to inject some depth into the character of Pete through that amazing ability he possesses to humanise all of his characters, but essentially Pete is just there to be a hindrance to Miranda's escape and doesn't actually get to do much of note from a plot perspective except moon over Miranda and then act as jailor. Cruz' character is probably the most interesting of the film with a pretty sad story arc but she's more of a plot device than a main character.
But it's not all bad. The film remains watchable, and although it doesn't fit into any good-bad-cheese list it's also not so terrible that you can't sit through it. Whether you'd actually want to is another question entirely. I can imagine the trope-laden, well trodden ideas behind the film still seeming fresh to the young and uninitiated, and it could certainly serve as a gateway to youngish, thirsty horror fans in the making who haven't yet been enticed by the pleasures of 2001's "Thirteen Ghosts" or 1999's "House on Haunted Hill" which, in my view, deliver a much better late 90s/early 2000s horror vibe.
What can I say? I came for the RDJ factor... and I pretty much stayed around for that, too. It seems 17 year old me and 31 year old me aren't so different after all.
[Image: Warner Bros., et al]
Hani
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