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REVIEW: GOTHIKA
(Mathieu Kassovitz, U.S., 2003)
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
a Film Comment online exclusive
Though its title fairly screams "direct-to-video," Gothika is in fact a new cobalt-blue psychological thriller showcase for Halle Berry. The actress has much at stake here, seeking to prove her capacity to carry a movie without a franchise safety net or the unveiling of her estimable breasts, whose timely revelation (in Swordfish) resuscitated a career languishing in B*A*P*S purgatory. Her chosen vehicle is the result of a spirited Hollywood game of pulling clichés from a hat: some supernatural vengeance-beyond-the-grave and shallow serial-killer stuff torn right from the supermarket checkout line blended with a Rebecca/Gaslight-style women's thriller of moral confrontation in which a wife gradually becomes aware of her husband's true, homicidal identity.
Berry plays Dr. Miranda Gray, a residential psychologist at a women's penitentiary operating under the direction of her husband (Charles S. Dutton, in a odd piece of casting). She's brilliant, possessed of a rigorous logician's mind - which we know not from anything we see onscreen but because Dutton tells us so. But in spite of, or perhaps because of, her alleged genius, there's an emotional reticence to the doctor. She's introduced holding a session with murderess inmate Chloe (a chap-lipped Penélope Cruz), who accuses the therapist of "listening with your head, not with your heart." And one wonders which organ determined her choice of suitors, as the doctor obviously reciprocates an attraction to rumpled coworker Dr. Pete Graham (Robert Downey Jr.). The exposition moves at a brisk clip - allotting one scene per secondary character - to construct a Popsicle-stick foundation of shorthand characterizations playing off against the inevitable, if somewhat abrupt, disintegration of the good doctor's tidy life. Driving home, one dark and stormy night, Berry has an encounter with a flame-wreathed girl ghost, and next thing she knows she's institutionalized, accused of her husband's murder. With off-day Rod Serling irony, just as the doctor had dismissed Chloe's satanic rape fantasies as paranoiac delusions, her onetime colleagues now analytically pooh-pooh Dr. Gray's stories of demonic possession. But we soon find ourselves asking (all together now) who's really insane, as Berry's supernatural hallucinations eventually lead her to a very real basement torture chamber where her husband and an unknown accomplice produced snuff films.
This is Berry's show, and she's nearly always onscreen - and nearly always underwhelming. When, with her life at stake, she squeaks, "We can't have a hearing next week," she comes across like a petulant teenager who has already made other plans. Worst of all, she's still upstaged by those breasts, whose strategic non-revelation becomes the film's structuring absence. Director Mathieu Kassovitz (best known stateside for his 1995 outer-Paris ghetto drama La Haine) makes a concerted effort to distract from Berry's threadbare histrionics, with sinewy camera duck-and-weaving. Most notably, he and imagist screen-polluter DP Matthew Libatique (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) devise a technique obviously lifted from video-game vernacular, in which the backward-dollying camera passes seamlessly through panes of glass. Such Playstation 2 cribbing gives a fairly good indication of this movie's level of thinking.
Gothika was produced in part by Robert Zemeckis's Dark Castle Entertainment, which, along with previous entries Ghost Ship and The House on Haunted Hill, seems intent on creating a veritable suspense-horror cottage industry of wasted celluloid in the shadow of What Lies Beneath, Zemeckis's own shoddy foray into the Hitchcockian and the supernatural. Much like the latter, Gothika fulfills its codified genre requirements with all the zeal of someone ticking off items on a grocery list. All of the familiar touchstones are present and accounted for: the bracing shivers of strings on the soundtrack, the creeping domestic suspicion, and, of course, the obligatory false-accusation guilt transference replete with attendant overtones of original sin and tortured Catholicism. Gothika's Hitch-envy even extends to a reprise of the reverse corkscrewing camera moving out from Janet Leigh's pupil in Psycho, utilized for reasons that I challenge anyone to justify. When Gothika's script has a prison guard at the shower announce, "It's time to wash away your sins," or brands its killer with an Anima Sola tattoo, we can't escape the feeling that such details exist as weary tenth-generation symbolic hand-me-downs and nothing else. The ideas in Gothika enter the material not as personal obsessions, but as awkward afterthoughts; it seems like a panicked rewrite occurred when the screenwriters decided the whole mess needed "meaning." Note the precocious boldfaced way the film's ostensible themes announce their presence, as in Berry's badass just-before-I-shoot-you one-liner, "Logic is overrated!" (Possibly a lost intertitle to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?) And if any further proof is needed of just what a cynical product this is, and how dumbly dismissive of psychology it can be, watch how any potential detours that elucidate the characters' relationships are treated facilely or skimmed across outright. When touching on the complications, sexual and otherwise, that would likely undercut Dr. Gray's marriage to a hubby who produces homemade death porn, what's the analysis? "It's hard to believe Doug did something like this," is about as much insight into the Dutton character as she or any other fellow doctors can manage.
Helmed by a time-killing French director, and featuring a pair of international starlets whose bankability spans three continents and countless focus groups, Gothika seems less a movie than a coproduced demographic-seeking missile fueled by moviemaking calculus at its most artless. Even the drearily generic setting seems meticulously buffed clean of detail. The city streets that Cruz and Berry walk in the film's closing scene are Montreal's, but the movie could just as easily take place anywhere in the Western hemisphere. I'm sure next year will bring worse (I write this with a live-action Garfield on the horizon), but it's difficult to imagine many as utterly unfelt and blasé as Gothika. As if to complete this film's dedication to soullessly recycling things once meaningful, Limp Bizkit' s cover of The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" plays out the closing credits, delivering the nearest possible aural equivalent to a boot up the ass on your way out the door.
© 2003 by Nick Pinkerton
