WINCHESTER: THE HOUSE THAT GHOSTS BUILT
released OUT NOW! 2018 | 15 | Blu-ray/dVd
Directors Michael and Peter spierig Cast Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, sarah snook, Finn scicluna-O’Prey
“It’s quite a special house, is it not?” asks Helen Mirren’s reclusive Sarah Winchester, surveying her impossible mansion.
Spot the rhetorical question. The Winchester Mystery House is a prime piece of real estate in American folklore. Construction began in 1884 and refused to end, expanding into a seven-storey labyrinth of almost 100 rooms. Sarah Winchester felt cursed by the lethal legacy of her late husband – majority shareholder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Co – and kept building to appease the spirits she was convinced lay within its walls.
The film takes this historical curiosity as its groundplan. “Inspired by actual events”, it declares, in the kind of blood-red font that screams artistic licence. The movie buys entirely into Sarah’s conviction, serving up glowing-eyed spectres and Exorcist-style demonic possessions with no room for potentially creepier ambiguities.
The cinematography and production design are excellent. The candlelit air looks thick with dust, and ominous crimson shades suggest a wound seeping through the house. But while there’s a concerted attempt at building atmosphere by suggestion – subliminal creaks, distant hammerings – the movie loses confidence in the power of understatement, tossing in cheap jump-scares wherever it can. What could have been an effective gothic chiller ends up feeling just a little tacky – and rarely scary.
Mirren’s great as the surprisingly flinty widow, but there’s so much more potential in this true-life tale of architecture and madness. Keep building.
Extras A 21-minute Making Of. Nick Setchfield