Gothika (2003)

               The more I see good actors giving bad performances in terrible films, the more sympathetic I get to how uncertain their chosen profession seems to be. So much of how they’re perceived and what they’re judged on is completely out of their control. Scripts get constantly rewritten, their makeup and wardrobes are a series of choices made by others, and they need to trust the directors and editors to make them look good in the final cut. The more I dig into the nuts and bolts of what on paper are completely acceptable films but which in practice are boring and nonsensical, the more a lot of trends become understandable. I never quite understood the way that actors, once they reach a certain level of success, suddenly start getting handed producer credits as part of signing on. I thought it was a way to grab a piece of the backend, and I’m sure that’s a lot of it, but I think it’s more important that they be put in an official position with some amount of authority over the decisions that go into the movie. I’m sure this is the reason why a lot of actors also like working with the same directors. I personally have never been impressed with anything Shawn Levy has stamped his name on, but apparently the way he works and the movies he turns out does something for Ryan Reynolds because the two have been inseparable for years now. Same with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo Decaprio, Peter Wier and Mark Wahlberg, the list goes on. The fundamental nature of making movies is controlling chaos, and it makes sense to cut down on the variables if you can.

They never do justify the title.

              As movies gradually started working more and more elaborate special effects into their productions, the opportunities for an actor to come off as supremely silly have skyrocketed. Behind the scenes features on movies used to be fascinating glimpses into the ingenuity of a cast and crew. Before he used up whatever inspiration he’d been given, Robert Zemeckis had ‘making of’ documentaries for his films that were almost as fascinating as the movies themselves. Now it’s just footage of actors in front of green screens with some dots drawn on their faces intercut with a bunch of other people staring at computer monitors. I refer you to the viral clip of Ian McKellen having a small breakdown on the set of the first Hobbit film, lost inside an ocean of green. While doing research on these films I’ve run across a number of anecdotes about actors being very nervous that what they were shooting wouldn’t come across as scary. Naomi Watts spent most of the shoot for ‘The Rings’ convinced that she was going to be embarrassed by the movie not being scary at all, which just proves that when you’re inside the movie during production you really don’t have any way of knowing how the thing’s going to turn out.

              That being said, ‘Gothika’ was the fourth film from Dark Castle Entertainment. Anyone signing up for this movie knew full well what they were getting into. The three previous films had all turned a profit and maintained a certain level of professionalism so it wasn’t likely to be complete dreck, but this is hardly the kind of movie you sign on to hoping to win some kind of award. It’s true that this is the best of their films I’ve seen, but that is a very low bar to clear. It rises all the way up to mediocre and isn’t as obviously cut to shreds as the rest of them. Most of the movie makes sense enough, although there are a couple of subplots that I have some very serious questions about.

              We finally have a movie with a single credited screenwriter again, it’s been a while. This movie was written by Sebastian Gutierrez, who I’m a little familiar with as I’ve previously written about both versions of his 2007 Lucy Liu film ‘Rise: Blood Hunter.’ These days he’s more of a writer/director, but for a few years there he had to toil away in the schlock mines. He’s one of the people to blame for ‘Snakes on a Plane,’ among other things. His script here isn’t terrible. Direction is by Mathieu Kassowitz, who’d been acting and directing in France since the 90’s. The only other movie he did that people are likely to be aware of is 2008’s ‘Babylon A.D.’ His direction isn’t awful in this movie. He has a very mobile camera and a lot of his blocking and framing take advantage of his habit of longer takes to inform the audience with only the visuals. And for once I wasn’t assaulted by rapid-fire editing. He’s also decent at establishing geography and spatial relationships and understands basic planting and pay off. These are not advanced techniques I’m complimenting him about here, I actually made an excited little note while watching that he thought to get insert shots. This is my thirty-first ghost movie in a row and my standards have now sunk dangerously low.

              The cast is decent, but really this is a showcase for Halle Berry. The movie poster is just a shot of her in the rain and it gives an accurate impression of the movie as it spends most of its time with her. She plays Dr. Miranda Grey, a prison psychiatrist, and she’s fine here. Berry was still riding the career boost she got from appearing in the first ‘X-Men’ film and rapidly cashing in. She’d already done ‘Swordfish’ and ‘Die Another Day’ by this point, but the good times were about to hit a snag as her next movie would be ‘Catwoman.’ Another big name in the cast plays another prison shrink, Pete Graham. People like to say that Robert Downey Jr.’s career was saved by ‘Iron Man,’ when that was just one of a number of comeback vehicles. According to interviews Downey finally got sober starting in July of 2003, after which he appeared in ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,’ ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ and ‘Zodiac.' This movie was shot right near the tail end of his truly rough times. He’d been fired from “Ally McBeal” in April of 2001 after getting arrested for wandering the streets barefootwith cocaine in his system. He ended up nearly broke after an extended stay in rehab. After an assist from Mel Gibson, who covered his insurance for ‘The Singing Detective,’ he started to put his life back together. He met his future wife, Joel Silver’s assistant Susan Levin, on the set of ‘Gothika,’ and with her assistance achieved sobriety by the middle of 2003. Shame that he was shooting this movie in early 2003, so here he looks noticeably rough. Something weird’s going on with his character as well, which I’ll circle back to later.

              They’re not the only actors slumming in this thing. Penelope Cruz plays the one (1) patient we see Miranda interacting with before the spooky kicks in, Chloe Sava, and surprise surprise she turns out to be important to the plot. This was a couple of years after her US breakthrough in ‘Vanilla Sky.’ Miranda’s husband, Douglas, is played by Charles S. Dutton, who’s always going to be Roc to me. John Carroll Lynch, a prolific character actor who I know from “Carnivàle,” plays local sheriff Bob Ryan, who also happens to be Douglas’s best friend. This will be important later.

              The hook of the movie, such as it is, is that Miranda Grey is a prison psychiatrist who ends up locked in that exact same facility after she’s accused of brutally murdering her husband with an axe. It ends up being because of a ghost, and I have to admit that I didn’t see a couple of the twists in the movie coming. The opening establishes a few key details: Chloe is in prison for murdering her abusive stepdad, Miranda is considered super logical and level-headed by the rest of the staff, there’s some tension between her and Pete, and she seems to have a loving relationship with her husband, who also happens to be the head of the prison hospital. Late one night Miranda is driving home a different way than normal because an intense storm has washed away part of the road. Near a bridge she sees a girl standing in the middle of the road and swerves to avoid her. She gets out to see if she’s all right and right after she notices that the girl is wounded there’s some quick cut edits and she wakes up in the prison hospital three days later.

              A decent chunk of the movie is spent in the facility as Miranda pieces together what happened to her. They try to justify the fact that she’s in a facility she worked in being treated by a physician she’s close to with some tossed off lines that it’s only been three days, they’re the only facility nearby, she was catatonic for a day and a half and she’s just now getting lucid, blah blah. They’re supposedly waiting for a ruling from a judge, but the movie’s over before that ever comes back up. She’s kept in the nice facilities at first, but as she keeps escaping and acting up she’s eventually moved into the general population and even threatened with solitary. It’s not the worst justifications for plot necessities I’ve ever seen but I kept getting distracted by the fact that everything is close enough to plausible that they can kind of get away with it, but they have to crowbar justifications in every once in a while to maintain the illusion that it makes any sense.

Way too much of the movie is this.

              She soon learns that she’s accused of chopping her husband into pieces with an axe. At first she denies any involvement at all, but eventually moments of the night begin to filter back into her memory and she haltingly starts to admit that she was there, but she absolutely didn’t do it. Meanwhile she’s making friends with Chloe as they bond about how you can’t trust anybody who thinks you’re crazy. Eventually the ghost starts messing with part of the prison, allowing her to roam around the halls at night trying to escape. The first time she tries the ghost leads her to where Chloe is being held in solitary confinement, where she sees a man with a prominent tattoo in there with her. After she’s captured she yells at them about the rape, but nobody believes her, so when she escapes the second time she just steals a car and takes off. Through a decent set of breadcrumbs left by the ghost she ends up at her husband’s cabin in the woods, where she discovers a secret basement room containing a bed and a video camera. She watches a tape back and realizes that her loving husband has been making snuff films. The last victim is even still there, alive.

              The movie has a small amount of fun with the fact that everyone is now in a very awkward position. Her lawyer starts making demands now that it’s been revealed that the murder victim was a serial killer, and a visibly upset sheriff Ryan points out that she’s still under arrest for murder. By this point Miranda has realized that she did kill her husband, but only because she was possessed by the ghost of one of her husband’s victims, which is the girl she almost hit with her car way back at the beginning of the movie. She’s being held in a jail cell at the sheriff’s office instead of the prison, which makes it convenient when sheriff Ryan reveals that he was Douglas’s accomplice this whole time, as well as the man in the cell with Chloe. He and Miranda struggle, then through a series of stupid events the ghost manages to set him on fire. This allows Miranda to grab his gun and shoot him in the head. The ending scene is set a year later as Miranda and Chloe, both now free, commiserate with each other. Miranda sees a young boy standing in the middle of the street, but before she can warn him about the truck approaching it passes right through him, revealing that she’s now sensitive to ghosts. I’m not even going to get into how unlikely it is that two admitted if justifiable murderers are out free in less than a year.

              Most of the movie is just fine. The clues are set up properly and it plays fair with the information we’re given. I got a weird vibe from her husband from their dialogue at the beginning, and once he’d been murdered I knew there was going to be more to his story because you don’t cast Charles S. Dutton for three minutes of screen time. It’s also never a bad idea to distrust the sheriff in a horror movie. The problems in the script don’t come from the central story, it’s from all of the side stuff.

              At a certain point the movie makes some choices that seem to imply it’s going to examine the abusive practices of modern hospitals and mental facilities. Miranda is very familiar with the staff, having worked with them for years, but now that she’s an inmate none of them treat her like a person. Instead she’s just another crazy inmate. They start shoving her around a little bit and dropping grim little jokes at her expense. This is in about one and a half scenes and then it gets forgotten. I understand the inclusion of Chloe, the movie needed to establish some clues about another person being involved in the murders and it chose to do so by having that person repeatedly sexually assault her, but other than humanizing Miranda a little bit she doesn’t get much attention from the movie.

              Then there Downey as Pete and his entire inclusion in the movie. I have a theory based on nothing but my experience of watching the film, and that is that the character of Pete was originally a much smaller role that got given to Downey as a way to get some publicity for a part that wasn’t important to the plot at all. This made the part get expanded way past its natural size. It’s eventually revealed that Miranda and Pete have some feelings for each other, but that’s not how his character comes across in the beginning at all. I even started making notes referring to the character as incel Downey. He’s always just a little too close and talks to her for a little too long. I was sure he was going to be revealed as super creepy at some point, but what happens instead is that he’s just off to the side being Robert Downey Jr. for most of the film.

              The character itself completely makes sense as a minor and mostly unimportant character. He’s her friend before her incarceration and sympathetic doctor afterwards. He’s useful in that Miranda can summarize her current understanding of the spooky shenanigans going on to him every once in a while to make sure the audience is up to speed. By making this doctor her friend we can also dispense with any idea that she’s going to be very badly treated at the facility since he’s looking out for her. He doesn’t need to be involved in figuring out any of the ghost business as that’s not his role in the film, he’s supposed to be another minor obstacle for her to overcome before the end of the movie.

Probably not great.

              The problem comes in when you cast Downey for that unimportant role and his sheer celebrity distorts the entire movie around him. If that character got an amount of screen time commensurate with his importance to the plot he’d be sixth billed, easily. Instead he was listed in all of the advertising as the second lead, despite not serving that function in the movie. Except for the very, very end at no point does he believe in ghosts or profess to be interested in hearing about them. Every scene between Pete and Miranda is frustrating because this is a horror movie and his very reasonable diagnoses of her psychosis is always going to be wrong due to the actual ghosts we’ve already seen.

              Then there’s that scene at the very end. Previous to the climax, the last time we saw his character he was looking up images online of the kind of tattoo Miranda claims she saw on the chest of the man in the cell with Chloe. Then eight minutes later, after she’s had her confrontation with Ryan at the sheriff’s office and she’s panting from the adrenaline, Pete just shows up out of nowhere. He thumps against the locked glass doors and mouths through them to her, “I’m sorry, Miranda.” She nods at him, the movie fades out to the time skip to the last scene, and his name is never mentioned again.

              At no point does Pete perform any action helpful towards the resolution of the movie. He’s not even an unwitting antagonist getting in her way, she breaks out of her cell twice and the entire prison in just a few days, he’s not an obstacle at all. He’s prominent in scenes where his character would definitely be present but normally only in the background with maybe a few lines instead of front and center like he is. There’s also absolutely no reason for him to show up at the sheriff’s office at the end. He doesn’t assist in taking down the sheriff and Miranda has gotten herself out of any danger by the time he arrives. There’s no outstanding emotional issue between them and their interaction doesn’t resolve anything. The movie also never even pretends to establish a reason for why he suddenly shows up or how he knew she was in any danger at all. The last he knew she was just cooling her heels in a cell until her legal situation got sorted out. I am convinced that Downey, or more likely Joel Silver, leaned on the director to add more scenes for him since he was a Name, and of course this also meant that he had to be present at the thrilling climax no matter how little sense it made.

              I’m starting to get a sense of what different levels of budget functionally entail. In terms of big set pieces, this movie is fairly comparable to something like ‘Ghost Ship’ or ‘Thir13en Ghosts,’ but it’s all of the little things going on in the background that give the money or lack thereof away. When Miranda is driving home at the beginning, she runs into a police blockade stopping people from driving down the washed-out road. The movie could have gotten away with just one cop car flashing its lights in the middle of the road, but instead they had five or six with a whole gaggle of cops milling around. They could have come up with an excuse to keep Miranda isolated from the other prisoners (probably should have), but after she’s placed in the general population we have scenes in the full prison yard with tons of inmates milling around. There’s a second floor to Miranda’s home when they could have gotten away with only providing set dressing for one. When people wonder where the money is on screen, I’m beginning to wonder how much of it goes to nearly invisible details in the background making it seem as close to the cinematic version of real life as possible.

              For the final movie an entire marathon of ghost films I could have certainly chosen a worse one. On the other hand I could have bent some rules and maybe ended on something more interesting, like ‘Oculus,’ or more definitely terrible, like that remake of ‘The Fog.’ But I had so many problems finding genuine ghost movies early on that eventually I was just happy that the ones I picked started having for-real spookums in them. This movie turned a healthy profit but was absolutely savaged by critics at the time of release, and while I’d almost certainly agree with all of their criticisms, after some of the stuff I’ve seen lately I can’t be too mad about it. Berry is decent, Downey is distracting, and Cruz should have gotten more to work with. It’s certainly the least embarrassing Dark Castle film so far, but considering their next movie’s a remake of ‘House of Wax’ featuring Paris Hilton I’m not sad to be getting off this train at this stop.