The Exorcist this movie sure ain’t
WINCHESTER (M, 99 MINS) DIRECTED BY PETER AND MICHAEL SPIERIG
Comedian Gilbert Gottfried has a gag he calls ‘‘my impression of Robert De Niro’s agent’’. Gottfried answers an imaginary phone and immediately screams: ‘‘He’ll Do It!’’ down the mouthpiece. Cue hilarity all round.
It’s funny because we wonder if it’s close to the truth. After seeing Winchester, I’m also thinking maybe Helen Mirren is represented by the same guy.
Winchester is based – very loosely – on a few weeks in the life of Sarah Winchester, as played by Mirren. Winchester inherited an absolute shed load of money and shares in the family firearms company when her husband died aged only 43.
The Winchester fortune was built on the famous repeating rifle, as seen in every Western ever made. And that was a source of much angst to the widowed Sarah. Some writers claim Sarah believed she was haunted and cursed by the spirits of everyone the family’s gun had killed.
In this telling, Sarah’s decision to endlessly build and rebuild her vast wooden mansion in San Jose, California is a symptom of her ghost-induced madness.
It’s a good yarn, and in the hands of a smart writer and inventive director it could have yielded a terrific, blackly comic film.
But sadly all the smart writers and inventive directors must have been stuck in traffic on the day Winchester was put together, leaving the Spierig brothers (Jigsaw) to turn in this turgid and dispiriting load of old wallop.
The script is an episodic and disjointed mess that never generates any tension or dread, so the only scares are of the very fleeting something-jumps-out-ofthe-shadows kind.
We’ve seen it all done before, better and more inventively. Last year’s Annabelle: Creation was no great horror movie, but it had moments that make even the best of Winchester look as menacing as an episode of Scooby Doo.
It also seems to me any film about a widow driven to madness by the ghosts of the victims of her family’s guns had at least the potential to work in a dark satire of the whole arms business.
Winchester flails in that direction in a few scenes, but soon just lurches back to being a disappointing, resolutely unscary and unforgivably boring slog.
The house, which should be a star of the show and practically a character in its own right, is reduced to a handful of stock shots – all obviously filmed on the same sunny day – while the interiors never look like anything other than a series of flimsy sets on a sound stage, miles away from the action.
There is simply no connection between the exterior and the interior. Which will serve well enough as a description of the entire film. Although Winchester has a few attractive surfaces, it never once engages the heart or the brain.
Mirren and Jason Clarke – as a doctor tasked with assessing Sarah’s sanity – are fine, of course. But neither of them ever convinces us they are genuinely scared of whatever is about to happen.
I couldn’t shake the feeling there must be a lot of out-takes of the pair of them collapsing into helpless giggles at the nonsense they’re being paid to spout. The Exorcist this ain’t.
Graeme Tuckett