Gothika

I used to think that no movie with the word ‘gothic’ in the title – even one with questionable spelling – would be dafter than Ken Russell’s 1986 modern Prometheus, Gothic. I stand humbly corrected. It’s not that Gothika is all that bad. But mere words cannot convey just how risibly silly Mathieu Kassovitz’s supernatural thriller is. (Mathieu – L’Haine seems a world away. We thought you were cool. What happened?)
This frightless horror pitches Halle Berry as a psychiatrist who awakens one morning to find herself a patient in her own asylum. Apparently, she’s murdered her husband while possessed by a malevolent ghoul wreaking havoc from beyond the grave (oh, that old excuse) and now she must prove her innocence, a task made considerably easier by the fact that she’s interred in the most badly-run mental institute since The Ninth Configuration.
The lunatics have been left in the care of one Robert Downey Jr., the electric generators keep going on the blink, there’s an evident light-bulb budget crisis, cell-keys are practically handed out by feeble-minded guards, rats reside happily in the cellar and the smocks are decidedly ill-fitting. (This means that they hang decoratively off the shoulders of Ms. Berry and fellow-inmate Penelope Cruz, though.) You have to think that Frances Farmer would have had the run of the place in five minutes, and so it proves for Halle, despite sobbing and blubbering throughout in a manner that makes her Oscar acceptance speech look like Queen Victoria addressing her 1842 cabinet.
Then there’s the equally heightened atmospherics. (Sigh!) I’m not sure which is the most ridiculous aspect – a spooky hospital (replete with pointy arches and gargoyles), the eternal lightning or Fred Durst singing over the closing credits, but it’s all a bit Hammer-horror.
And in case things weren’t quite preposterous enough, Gothika also requires the audience to believe that Halle Berry, one of the world’s most beautiful women – she of the almond eyes and wasp waist – is hitched to Charles S. Dutton, a man with the portly dimensions of an esurient African dictator. I mean, really.
For all that, the film does have a trashy, histrionic charm destined to work brilliantly on scream-prone, ‘fraidy-cat girls. And while it’s no Shock Corridor, Halle’s hair extensions are very fetching.

98 mins. Cert 18. Opens April 2