In a bid to make this film feel macabre and mysterious, director Mathieu Kassovitz and production designer Graham Walker dressed up the Woodward Penitentiary — where the bulk of the action in “Gothika” takes place — to look eerily like the set of a Marilyn Manson video. Outside, it’s always raining buckets, and inside, it’s darker than a coal miner’s lungs. The criminal psychologists at Woodward, we’re told, are some of the brightest in the field, dedicated to treating dangerously disturbed, perpetually gloomy female psychopaths. Funny thing though, in “Gothika’s” 95 interminable minutes it never occurs to the supershrinks that they might brighten everyone’s mood by simply opening the drapes and replacing all the flickering lightbulbs. Of course, it’s pretty clear the lights weren’t on when “Gothika” was conceived because this is one of the dimmest supernatural thrillers in recent memory.
Dr. Miranda Grey has it all: She looks like Halle Berry, is married to Woodward’s highly-respected chief administrator (Charles S. Dutton) and is often referred to as “brilliant,” despite the fact that much of her analysis sounds as though it were gleaned from watching “Dr. Phil.” Then, while driving home one dark and stormy night, she has a lights-out encounter with a dead girl who has runny eyeshadow and scary-looking split ends, and awakens to find herself imprisoned at Woodward, accused of murdering her husband. Haunted by fractured visions of the traumatic event, Miranda struggles — with the help of Dr. Pete Graham (Robert Downey Jr. in a “what was he thinking?” role) — to apply the logic that has served her career so well to a completely illogical series of events. And it doesn’t help that it won’t stop raining, and all the damn lights are flickering, and the dead girl intermittently pops up to smack her around. It’s no wonder Miranda keeps pounding on the walls and screaming, “Why are you doing this to me?” Halfway through the film, you’re almost guaranteed to want to do the same.
Screenwriter Sebastian Gutierrez freely pilfers key elements from a host of superior horror flicks ranging from “The Ring” to “The Sixth Sense,” but his attempts to fuse the paranormal with a real world murder-mystery in “Gothika” are, to put it nicely, pathetika. This film is a big, fat Thanksgiving turkey, served a few days early. (Rated R for violence, brief language and nudity. Running time: 95 minutes)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 21, 2003. Read the original PDF.