re:mote voices

Title: Gothika
Cast: Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr, Charles Dutton, John Carroll Lynch, Penélope Cruz
Director: Mathieu Kassovitz

To be honest I had kind of been avoiding Gothika, the trailer was filled with clichés, and having gotten bored enough to catch it I guess I should have stuck with my instinct after all. To be fair there are some nice little touches, but on the whole Gothika is by numbers, every time you think something spooky is about to happen… it does. In fact I had the whole thing worked out before the characters had even worked out that there was even something to work out, and I was annoyed to find that I was right on every count.

Halle Berry stars as Miranda Grey, a top psychologist working with the criminally insane. The same night she is working with a patient, played by Penelope Cruz, who claims to have been raped by the devil, she encounters a ghost on her way home. Next thing she knows she is in the mental ward where she works, only now she is a prisoner, detained for murder. This sets up the struggle between the psychologists mind that denies the supernatural against the clearly illogical events that are happening.

In composition terms Gothika is certainly put together in a professional manner, there are some nicely done visual effects. But it is far too much by the book, and one gets the impression that someone thinks casting and dotting the i's and crossing the t’s of the spooky rules is enough to make a film worthwhile. It isn’t.