This haunted house has to be condemned
Winchester 15 cert, 99 min
Dirs Michael and Peter Spierig Starring Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, Sarah Snook, Angus Sampson, Laura Brent
Not even Helen Mirren’s frostiest glares can see off the evil spirits in Winchester, a derelict Australian horror film of a specific and annoying kind. It thinks “based on actual events” are words likely to boost the shudder count: instead, they appear to have cramped every flight of imagination a haunted-house flick should feel emboldened to make.
Mirren, who arrives a reel or so in wearing black mourning lace and an expression of doomed martyrdom, has the real-life role here of Sarah Winchester, supposedly cursed widow of the 19th-century US gun manufacturer.
Her life was bizarre: after her husband’s death from tuberculosis in 1881, she spent the next 38 years devoting her vast fortune to extending and re-extending the socalled Winchester Mystery House, a sprawling San Jose mansion later to become a tourist attraction for its mad, MC Escher-like layout of 161 rooms and stairs leading nowhere.
Already the inspiration for the Stephen King miniseries Rose Red, this deranged residence promises to be the star of the show, until we actually get a look at it, and realise that the budget of this glum production won’t stretch to inviting us in properly at all.
The film has about five sets and they never feel like they connect together, but this is less an attempt at disorienting the viewer than simply cutting corners; the grisly, overdone lighting, meanwhile, makes you want to hide behind your fingers for all the wrong reasons.
Jason Clarke shoulders the focal role as a psychiatrist sent to test Sarah’s state of mind by fellow Winchester company types hoping to dislodge her from the board. He pitches up at the house, like Deborah Kerr in
The Innocents or Julie Harris in The Haunting, and is fast besieged by spectres in his shaving mirror, strikes up chats with household staff who turn out to be long dead, and remains blocked from one chamber of the manse – a derelict conservatory – which seems especially tainted with whispery menace.
It’s the sort of exercise which needs stylistic discipline or at least a few jolts of originality to work, and those are the bits missing. The film’s first half is ruinously bogged down with drawingroom chit-chat – one scene between Mirren and Clarke goes on so long you can practically feel their tea getting cold. And then the second half is a hectic pile-up of gun-toting poltergeist antics and flustered jump scares.
The Spierig brothers, who previously gave Sarah Snook a career-breakthrough role in 2014’s transgender-sci-fi curio Predestination, hand her the booby prize part of Sarah’s niece here, who has no particular function except to stand around expecting the worst. And the film is not much kinder on Mirren, whose potential as a fearsome scream queen goes untapped in sequence after sequence.
Agog in her ever-expanding mansion as well as the prisoner of her late husband’s homicidal legacy, Sarah Winchester might have ruled as the heroine of some weird art film, by a Peter Strickland, say. The woman built what’s reputed to be America’s most haunted house, but the worst thing that ever happened to her – a whole century later – was this. TR