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What do Haley Joel Osmont and Halle Berry have in common besides
similar-sounding first names? They both see dead people. But unlike the
1999 psycho-suspense film The Sixth Sense, Berry's film, Gothika,
is riddled with problems, the most important being that it doesn't know
what kind of movie it wants to be. A surprise, given the top-notch cast,
film crew and production company behind the wheel.
The plot of the film centers around Berry's character, Miranda Grey,
a pscyhiatrist for in a women's psychiatric prison for the criminally
insane. On a dark and stormy night, driving home from the prison, she
swerves to avoid hitting a young girl standing in the middle of the
road. In Miranda's attempt to communicate with her, the girl erupts into
flames, during which an aparent mind-meld transfer takes place. The next
scene finds Miranda in the very same prison where she worked, only now
she's an inmate, accused of brutally murdering her husband. With no
memory whatsoever, she struggles not only to unravel the mystery about
what really happened, but she has to fight against the very system she
used to work in.
The premise of the movie seemed reasonable enough. As the title
suggests, the "Gothic" roots of the film are found in the dark and
violent medieval times, where bad intentions were attributed to
possession by the devil or other evil spirits. Yet, not once does the
movie follow or even explore this track. Instead, it meanders around an
array of typical slasher-film themes we've all seen a million times before.
The movie falls apart almost immediately during the scene where Miranda
wakes up in prison, when the characters
behave in ways totally inconsistent with how they were establised before.
This, for sole purpose of building suspense. And, as many movies
of this type tend to do, the juxtaposition of incoherent script,
irrelevant characters, and undeveloped relationships, all chip away at
the movie's plausibility, disengaging the audience from caring about
anything, or anyone. Mixed with the cliché suspenseful music,
false surprises and predictable scene evolution, the last third of the
film finds most of the audience laughing audibly at just about every turn.
Had Gothika explored some of the culture that its name implies, or
had developed a truly puzzling murder-mystery, or even established
stronger characters that made the movie more about them, as the Sixth
Sense had done, perhaps the movie could have saved face. But as it is,
I can't even recommend it to Ozzy Osborne... or his kids.
You can find this movie on the internet database here:
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0348836/
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