Review: Winchester
This week was a first for our Sneak Preview group: Our cinema actually had picked a horror — or at least horror-ish — movie called Winchester [IMDb, Trailer (YouTube)].
The renowned psychologist Eric Price (Jason Clarke) is one day approached and asked to take on a very special case. Sarah (Helen Mirren), the widow of William Winchester, founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, still is at the head of the company and the management board wants to wrench control from her. Her behavior has been described as eccentric and so they seek to have her declared insane and picked Price to assess her mental health.
When Price arrives on her estate, he is speechless. She has built a massive house with hundreds of rooms in all kinds of styles, randomly assembled. And there is a permanent building crew on the estate, which is tearing down and replacing parts of the house around the clock. Winchester is plagued by the thought of all the people that have been killed by the weapons her family’s company has created. She believes that the ghosts of the victims are looking for her, some with unfinished business, others looking for vengeance or simply because they are lost. It is her believe that by building an exact replica of the room they died in she can tie their souls to her and the house. Once this happened, she can converse with them and help them to find peace. Not all of them want to be helped, however, and the difficult cases are locked into their rooms until they are willing to move on.
As Price starts to discover the reasons for Winchester’s eccentric behavior, he is slowly sucked into her world. His own history comes back to haunt him and the fact that he once was dead for three minutes puts him into a very special situation.
This story is inspired by the life of Sarah Winchester. After her husband and daughter died, a spiritualist suggested that she is haunted by the ghosts of the people killed by her company’s weapons. So, she decided to use her insane amount of wealth — inheritance and company shares — to buy a farmhouse and turn it into a sprawling mansion with ultimately seven stories. The Winchester Mystery House [Wikipedia] is to this day a huge tourist attraction and considered one of the most haunted and spooky places in the US.
Personally, I find this history quite intriguing and a great basis for a movie. Unfortunately, the creators decided to turn it into a horror movie, which is not at all my cup o’ tea, especially when it is done mostly using jump scares. To me, this is not enjoyable or thrilling, but downright annoying. I think the potential would have been there to turn this into a well-crafted film with a creative approach to tension and horror by slowly building up the eerie feeling of this incredible building simply by emphasizing the fact that it is mostly uninhabited, confusing and pretty much a monument to a very dark history. But sadly, they went another way and chose an — in my opinion — inferior approach.
But don’t take my opinion at face value. I usually stay away from horror movies and the only one I kind of like is The Ring [IMDb] (yes, the remake from 2002). So, avid fans of the genre will probably find qualities in this movie that I just cannot see.
