Gothika movie review & film summary (2003)
But those are all bothersome details of plausibility and logic, and those are the last two qualities you should seek in "Gothika." This is a psychothriller with the plausibility of a nightmare -- which is to say, it doesn't make sense, but it keeps your attention. The movie is by Mathieu Kassovitz, the 35-year-old French director and actor who in "Crimson Rivers" (2001) made one of the most original and stylish of recent thrillers.
He's worked with stars before (Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel in that one), but here, with the Oscar winner Halle Berry at the center of the story, he depends on star power to involve us in the classic Hitchcock formula of the innocent character wrongly accused. Hitch explained that if you cast the right star -- Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant, for example -- the audience knew they didn't do it, and so you moved on from there.
Berry's character is Miranda Grey, a psychiatrist in a prison straight out of Dickens. She works with fellow shrink Pete Graham (Robert Downey Jr.) and is newly wed to her boss, Dr. Douglas Grey (Charles S. Dutton). I'm thinking, hey, this is refreshing: The beautiful woman is married to an overweight guy for a change. But, no, fat equals fate.
On the obligatory dark and stormy night, Miranda takes a detour and swerves to avoid a ghostly, ghastly girl standing in the middle of the road, who bursts into flames. When she wakes up, she's a prisoner in her own institution and Pete breaks the news to her: She's accused of the brutal murder of her husband. How can this be? She tries to remember, but there's a blank. Chloe (Penelope Cruz), a former patient, now a fellow inmate, explains the rules: Now that Miranda is officially insane, it doesn't matter what she says, since it will be dismissed as her illness talking.
The movie introduces several intriguing characters, including Sheriff Ryan (John Carroll Lynch) and Phil Parsons (Bernard Hill), the prison warden. And it teases us with the possibility that any of them -- or Pete, of course -- could be behind the monstrous misunderstanding. Miranda tries to reason her way free. "Did we have an affair?" she asks Pete. "Did you want to?" Downey and Berry have a lot of fun in a scene where both characters realize they are heading toward a dangerous possibility.
All is finally explained in an appropriately overwrought series of climaxes, which left me wondering how (1) the ghost of the girl triggered Miranda's blackout, (2) whether the murderer(s) of Dr. Grey could have controlled, evoked or summoned the ghost, (3) how, assuming that he/she/they could not have, they could have predicted or triggered Miranda's blackout and timed the murder to match.
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