GOTHIKA

Rating: 1

You have to wonder if the makers of GOTHIKA started out to make a comedy and then realized that something had gone awry. This would explain a great many things and I don’t just mean the unintentional laughter that this would-be supernatural thriller evokes.
Our heroine is Miranda Grey (Halle Berry), a brilliant psychiatrist with a bright future in front of her, a boss who is also her loving husband (Charles Dutton) at her side, and a fellow doctor (Robert Downey, Jr.) mooning over her to no avail. Life is good for Grey until one night when a rainstorm forces her to take a detour along her drive home and away from the life she used to know. Taking the road less traveled, she encounters a wispy blonde in the road who doesn’t bat an eye as Gray swerves off the road to avoid her. When Grey investigates what’s up with the statue routine, the girl bursts into flame and Grey wakes up as a patient in the psychiatric penitentiary where she had practiced her craft. Her husband has been brutally murdered with an axe and the evidence points to her, the mooning doctor is her personal physician, and that wispy blonde is still popping up and not in a friendly way. Is she hallucinating? Is there a ghost on the loose with attitude problems? Is it a grand conspiracy? By the time we get the plot set up we actually wonder where it’s all leading, but once the action begins, things go downhill interest-wise very, very quickly.
The entire film should have the internal logic of a dream, the better to make us jump and scream as we observe the goings-on in the creepy old hospital with the iffy electricity and the wispy blond going bump in the night. Sure, director Mathieu Kassovitz uses neato keeno sweeping shots that have a dreamlike quality, and the art direction immerses us in a world of muted grays, browns and blues that keeps things murky and mysterious. Unfortunately, the logic displayed has no consistency, as though everyone concerned were taking to heart one of the character’s observations that logic is overrated. As the story progresses, with one episode more ridiculous than the last, the film doesn’t just strain credulity, it viciously rends it into teeny tiny pieces and then dances upon it with wild abandon and maniacal glee. Gray is turned loose in the very population of the criminally insane that she treated. There is a volleyball net in the exercise yard for the convenience of those self-same criminally insane because they would never, ever think of using it for anything other than the pursuit of a relaxing team sport. The chase sequences through the penitentiary and beyond are numberless and endless and make no sense. In one of them, Grey, recently brutalized by either a ghost or her own inner demons into unconsciousness, suddenly comes around and leads the guards on a merry chase despite having just received cuts, abrasions, and several direct blows to her head. As for delving into the mystery of what is actually going on, let’s just say that the clues don’t come together in a way that follows any sort of logical (there’s that word again) progression. One suspects the screenwriter, Sebastian Gutierriez felt the need to get the film over with so that everyone could just go home and put the whole ugly experience behind them. Or perhaps it’s just sloppy editing on top of a silly story. There are leaps that go nowhere and twists that make no sense whatsoever with the information we are given to work with. Music cues that are traditionally used to telegraph to the audience that something scary is about to happen sound with no payoff, in fact, for no apparent reason, except, perhaps, to see if the audience is still paying attention. The audience with whom I saw this turkey was and responded by laughing, and not the nervous laughter that a thriller can sometimes inspire. No, this laughter was not only derisive, it was dismissive. Plus none of the actors seem to be very invested in what’s going on, or perhaps they thought that sleepwalking through the film would add to the dreamlike quality.
The scariest thing about GOTHIKA is the set-up for a sequel. The thought that someone might envision this garbled exercise as a franchise of some kind sets the true chill of pure terror up my spine.