'Winchester' Misfires (Film Review)

If I kept higher expectations for new releases these days, then I surely would have been disappointed by Winchester, the recent horror flick starring Dame Helen Mirren and Jason Clarke. As it is though, I was only marginally let down.

I've always had a fascination with the historical figure of Sarah Winchester and her mysterious mansion of walled-off rooms and stairways to nowhere. I recall viewing a documentary on the subject as an adolescent that sparked my imagination and probably kept me awake for a few nights.

Sarah Winchester was a wealthy widow who inherited the Winchester Arms Company from her late husband, William Winchester. Sarah came to eschew the famous rifle bearing her last name, known as it was for its deadly accuracy and claiming innumerable lives on the western frontier. After the death of her husband and baby daughter, Sarah came to feel that her family was cursed. She retreated to her mansion home near San Francisco, California and began what would become a lifelong building project and obsession.

The legend goes that Sarah believed herself to be haunted by all the spirits whose mortal lives had been ended by a Winchester rifle. Through nightly seances, these vengeful ghosts demanded Sarah make accommodation for them. Using automatic writing, the spirits would channel architectural designs through Sarah and onto paper. Sarah would then hand off these designs to her permanent labor force, who would then execute them in reality. That the "designs" were often bizarre and nonsensical made no difference to Sarah, and the crew did as they were told. All of the above has been denied by scholars at one time or the other. But it sure makes for a tantalizing story.

  The exterior of the mansion as it appears in the film. The effects work is

 shockingly bad here. This looks like a background from the old 1998 PC game, Myst. 

Set in 1906, the film Winchester is told from the perspective of fictional character Dr. Eric Price (Clarke), who is hired by the board of the Winchester Arms Company to evaluate Mrs. Winchester's mental health. Price is brought to stay at the mysterious mansion and ghostly chaos ensues.

We discover early on that Clarke is a skeptic and man of science, with an addiction to laudanum on the side. He attributes his initial spirit sightings in the mansion to the influence of said drug, that is until Sarah (Mirren) has her hollow-eyed butler confiscate the goods from Price's room. 

The first twenty minutes or so of the film are intriguing, and I hoped were providing the foundation for a meaningful plot and measured horror. However, the content of the remaining run-time had me convinced that the writing team had a substance addiction themselves. I have no idea how the screenplay for this film made it past the green-light stage.

What heralded the doom of this picture was, as you might guess, the first of many jump scares. The build to it was superb, utilizing a set up with Price and a shaving mirror. Each time Price turns to retrieve something from his bag, he moves the mirror in its frame to reveal an empty armchair in the corner of the room. This repeats two or three times, building the tension. If the writers had possessed any degree of subtlety or finesse, they would have left it at that--just a build up with no pay off. It would have been a clever way to hook the audience and keep them on the edge waiting for the first real spirit appearance. As it is though, we are assaulted with a jump scare in the form of a rotted ghost face appearing behind the mirror.

As I suspected, the moment would epitomize the entirety of the film: a wasted opportunity. What follows is a tiresome and oddly comical series of "thrills" and "scares", culminating in the giggle-inducing image of a vengeful Confederate ghost throttling a battered Mrs. Winchester against a shattered gun case. This film is not the first time in recent memory that I've wondered if the filmmakers are trolling the audience. I'm formulating a conspiracy theory that this is actually an avant-garde style of movie making--a cynically cheeky ode to our times if you will.

The always superb Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester.

Mirren and Price do a capable job in their respective roles, though Mirren seems to grow rather glassy eyed as the picture progresses. The far too few scenes of the two together in Price's evaluatory  sessions show potential, and one wishes these moments had been fleshed out and shaded. The themes of coping with grief, the fear of death, and skepticism vs. superstition are powerful and really could have been explored at length here. Is Sarah merely a grief-stricken widow, encased in a world of delusions, or does she truly communicate with the dead? And by extension, is Price, himself a widower, retreating from grief and guilt in the skepticism he promulgates? These questions should have been the heart and soul of the film. Perhaps such was the original intent of the writers. But somehow, somewhere, something went terribly askew, not unlike the Winchester mansion itself.