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GOTHIKA
5/10
USA
2003 : Matthieu KASSOVITZ : 96 mins
Acclaimed
criminal-psychologist Miranda Grey (Halle Berry) works at the remote hilltop
Woodward Penitentiary alongside her husband Doug (Charles S Dutton), who
runs the place, and her flirtatious colleague Pete (Robert Downey, Jr).
The institution’s all-female patients include delusional Chloe (Penelope
Cruz), who tells a skeptical Miranda she’s being violated by a satanic
figure. Driving home one dark and very stormy night, Miranda has a scary
encounter with a traumatised young woman (Kathleen Mackey) she finds standing
in the middle of the road. She blacks out, waking up three days later
– incarcerated in a cell at Woodward Penitentiary, having apparently murdered
Doug with an axe. As Miranda struggles to fill in the blanks in her memory,
she’s plagued by further terrifying visions of the spectral young girl
– a vengeful phantom, or a manifestation of Miranda’s dubious sanity?
The Hollywood
debut from Kassovitz (best known as the boyfriend of Amelie,
though better in Birthday
Girl) finds the French actor-director much closer to the lurid
territory of his last movie, Euro-smash chiller-thriller Crimson Rivers
than his first, the hard-hitting, Cannes prize-winning La Haine
(1995), which now seems like a very long time ago indeed. Here he
stirs a heady, blood-spattered, red-herring-strewn brew of murder, retribution,
sado-masochism and madness, played out in a shadowy night-world of sinister,
dimly-lit rooms and cells. After all, the film isn’t called Gothika
for nothing.
Actually,
the film is called Gothika for nothing: it’s a made-up word
which is never once spoken or shown anywhere in the movie, instead intended
to evoke a particular kind of heightened mood and genre. Just like the
film itself, audiences sort-of know what the title means, even
if, on reflection, it doesn’t make any sense at all - as Miranda remarks
near the end, “Logic is overrated.” Gothika may be fundamentally
a very silly piece of work (e.g. – for such a ‘brilliant’ psychologist,
Miranda is ridiculously fond of labelling people “crazy”) but at least
Kassovitz and his scriptwriter Sebastian Gutierrez are fully aware of
this fact, and make no bones about it.
To tip us
the wink, they have penitentiary guards watch Gordon Douglas’s legendary
giant-ant shocker Them! (1954) on TV, commenting “Those
fifties B-movies, man!” Gothika isn’t much like many fifties
B-movies, however. It’s more like a combination of Sam Fuller’s delirious
Shock Corridor (1963) – in which a reporter gets himself committed
to an asylum to solve a murder, with unfortunate results – and Gothika
co-producer Robert Zemeckis’s What
Lies Beneath – an intriguing, watchable whodunnit which disappointingly
spirals off into daft, anything-goes supernatural territory.
But Gothika
is, primarily, a glossy, fancily-cast (Cruz, Downey Jr, Bernard Hill)
big-budget update of those British woman-in-peril psychological chillers
from the 1960s and 1970s, in which the likes of Susan Strasberg and Judy
Geeson doubted their sanity under the nefarious influence of devious/scheming
relatives/spouses. It’s a somewhat disreputable sub-genre to which Marc
Forster paid deft tribute a couple of years back with Everything
Put Together (featuring a Geeson cameo). Since then Forster has
moved on to much bigger (if not better) things, in the shape of Monster’s
Ball - whose Oscar-winning star was, coincidentally enough, Berry.
Though not undertaining, and quite emphatically a star-vehicle, Gothika
represents something of an ill-advised retrograde step for the supposedly
now-respectable thespian: presumably she signed before the Academy
elevated her to the classy A-list. Then again, perhaps not – next up,
Catwoman!
2nd April,
2004
(seen 31st March : UGC, Middlesbrough)
by Neil
Young
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