The movie is a modestly budgeted yet visually polished product. The ending tries to be thoughtful, but there’s not enough investment in these characters to care. Even the scares, too infrequent for this type of film, have a consistent misdirection that becomes tired and predictable. They have a history of having a hand in everything - working on visual effects and the musical score.Īnd yet they can’t settle on a tone. “Winchester” is directed by the stylish Spierig twins, Peter and Michael, who made the scrappy Ethan Hawke vampire film “Daybreakers” in 2010. The lack of fun is a big issue throughout the film. Someone with a little less to lose (Debra Winger? Elizabeth Perkins? Nicolas Cage?) might have taken the role over the top, injecting some much-needed intentional humor. She acts as if she knows she’s in a bad film and doesn’t want to call attention to herself. But frankly, she’s not making much of an effort. “Winchester” stars Helen Mirren, which normally would be the first thing we’d mention. The undead are popping out of closets and materializing in mirrors like Hell had the Winchester Mystery House on a Groupon. It doesn’t take long to establish that yes, in fact, there are evil spirits in the house. The film begins with a San Francisco doctor (Jason Clarke), sent to the sprawling house by horse and carriage to assess the mental condition of the Winchester gun heiress, who thinks she’s been cursed by the victims of her weapons.
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Does it want to be a haunted fun house full of jump scares? Does it want to be a Gothic period piece with a romantic message? “Winchester” is both, and neither. (This movie wasn’t, ominously.) It just can’t pick a side. It’s not an atrocious film - far worse productions have been screened in advance for critics. Like the spirits in the senseless corridors of Sarah Winchester’s never-ending Victorian construction project, the movie is stuck in its own limbo. “The silver chandeliers were imported from Germany,” a character in the house explains early on, as if she’s forgotten she’s in a film set in 1906 and thinks she is working as a tour guide on summer break from De Anza College.
It’s unclear exactly who in the audience is supposed to love “Winchester,” other than the cinematic lottery winners working at the Winchester Mystery House.Īlthough it isn’t a top-flight horror movie - too slow for thrill-chasers, too ridiculously fictionalized for historians - the film serves as a proper 99-minute commercial for that San Jose tourist spot.
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