WINCHESTER (2018)

Originally published in Cinema Knife Fight, February 5, 2018.

A Cinema Knife Fight Review With L.L. Soares

(THE SCENE: A huge mansion. Workmen are hammering and drilling in the background. LL SOARES and DAN KEOHANE ring the bell and are invited inside by a WOMAN, who guides them to a large study)

WOMAN: My aunt will be right with you.

LS: No rush. We’ve got all the time in the world.

(WOMAN exits, laughing quietly to herself)

DK: So why are we here again?

LS: Atmosphere! This house is a lot like the one in the new movie WINCHESTER, where Helen Mirren plays an old lady who’s constantly having builders add new rooms to her house.

DK: Because of the ghosts!

LS: That’s right. In fact, the movie was originally going to be called WINCHESTER: THE HOUSE THAT GHOSTS BUILT. I’m not sure why that changed. It was a little long, but it told us more than just plain WINCHESTER. That could be the title of anything.

DK: Funny thing is, I thought it was still called WINCHESTER: THE HOUSE THAT GHOSTS BUILT until you said that. Next, you’ll tell me it’s really called CLOVERFIELD: THE GHOST ARMY.

LS: You wish. In this movie, we meet Eric Price (Jason Clarke), a psychiatrist in the early 20th century who is addicted to laudanum, a medicine from back then that was made up of alcohol and morphine. In fact, when we first see Price, he’s high on the stuff with some ladies of the evening. We learn later that there’s a reason for his self-medicating: he’s grieving from a tragedy that shattered his life.

As the movie opens, he’s kind of a failure in his chosen field. As he puts it, he’s “on sabbatical.” A representative shows up at his door from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, who offers Price a large sum of money (that will wipe out all his debts, and then some) if he will assess the mental faculties of Sarah Winchester (Mirren), the heiress who inherited a majority stake in the Winchester company when her husband died, and is using her vast fortune to turn her house into a never-ending maze of rooms.

Price goes to Sarah’s estate, and soon is seeing strange figures who flit around the house with sinister intent. Sarah’s reason for the constant construction is so that the house will be big enough to house all of the ghosts of people who died because of the very firearms that the Winchester Company produces. Everyone thinks she’s crazy, including the men who hired Price, but Price isn’t so sure, as Sarah takes it upon herself to convince him that she is sane.

Where did that woman go? I thought she’d be back by now.

DK: (quietly) In this house there are many rooms… (shakes his head and blinks). Sorry. Maybe she got lost?

LS: Someone could have at least brought us some tea, though. I saw an army of servants when we first came in.

DK: They’re probably too busy cleaning the 100 rooms. Or their contract only calls for them to be in a certain number of scenes.

(CASPER THE GHOST wanders into the room)

CASPER: Do you want to be my friend?

LS: You again! Are you in every haunted house I visit for this column?  Nobody wants to be your stupid friend. SCRAM!

CASPER: Gee, mister, you sure are mean. (Exits)

DK: Don’t you think you were a bit rough on the little guy?

LS: Not really. Back to our review.

WINCHESTER is one of those stories that is based on “actual events.” But “based on” can be a pretty broad term. There is a house like this one, in San Jose, California, and the heiress of the Winchester fortune did have numerous rooms constructed for the same reason, and there was speculation about whether or not she was crazy. But, right away, we know what this movie’s opinion will be. It is a horror movie, after all.

DK: The idea that the Winchester family is haunted by the souls of so many people killed by the weapons they have profited from is pretty cool. That, plus the grieving widow who feels she must atone for her late husband’s creation by building room after room to house the spirits. Of course, all of this is completely true. I’d seen a documentary of “the house that Winchester built” (that’s not the name) a few years ago and this is exactly why Mrs. Winchester built such an elaborate and ever-changing house.

LS: But I wish they’d done more with the idea, because the movie we have is kind of humdrum. By the second half, when the ghost activity shifts into full gear, I didn’t find the movie very scary, so that didn’t really work, either. The plot has a lot to work with, and a lot of potential, and yet it never really does much with it. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen in other haunted house movies. So, my reaction to most of the film straddled the fence of boredom. Once the real scares do start happening, they’re just not that scary.