Thursday, May 17, 2012

80 - Gothika

    Halle Berry plays a psychiatrist who winds up imprisoned in her own hospital after her husband is found murdered.

    Again, my comments probably will include some spoilers, since the quality of the movie demands it.

    After I finished watching this, I initially had a mixed feeling about it.  There is some good stuff in this.  Robert Downy Jr is a pleasure to watch.  The movie is photographed well, and there are some memorable sequences, mostly the shower room and the pool.  There's a good atmosphere built up, mostly through the heavy blue-and-grey colors of the picture, combined with most of the action taking place in the same collection of rooms.
    The problem is that the movie doesn't stand up to scrutiny well.  My specific complaint was not addressed (which I will get to later) but there are many smaller holes throughout the picture.  I wasn't aware of them since I wasn't taking the movie too seriously.  But if you take a look at the discussions on IMDB, it's clear that defenders of these problems need to bend over backwards to create explanations.

    Here's a spoiler-full version of the story.  Halle Berry is a psychiatrist.  One rainy night, after leaving work, she almost hits a naked lady standing in the middle of the road.  She talks to the lady, who bursts into flames.  Then Halle Berry wakes up in her institution, as an inmate.
    It turns out that the lady she saw was some sort of spirit that took possession of her.  Thus, Halle Berry went home and killed her husband.  This revelation takes about half the movie to become clear (although it is strongly spelled out to the audience ahead of time).
    The rest of the movie is taken up with explaining why this spirit did this.
    After escaping from the institution, Halle Berry discovers that her husband was into raping, possibly torturing, and eventually killing young girls.  He kept this going on at a vacation house he kept.  After uncovering the room dedicated to this, and turning it into a new police investigation, she is kept in police custody, where we get a reveal that the sheriff was also involved in this rape/torture/murder thing.
    Of course, the moment that we figure out that the deceased husband was involved, we already know that the sheriff is too.  But for some reason, Halle Berry's mind doesn't work that fast.  So she spends plenty of time explaining exactly what she suspects to him.

    That was the biggest head-against-the-wall moment of the movie.  We had plenty of foreshadowing, it was made obvious that the two guys would go to that vacation house together.  She knew it.  She'd have to be a moron to not have known the sheriff was involved as soon as she found their playroom.

    I had two key complaints.
    First, Halle Berry acts crazy.  Perhaps this is supposed to leave open the interpretation that "maybe she actually is crazy, and wasn't possessed by a spirit!"  Except that we see that spirit possession happening.  There's nothing else in the movie to suggest that she's anything other than a normal person.  This results in a lot of scenes where it's hard to stand watching her, because she's acting like a lunatic for no good reason.
    Second, there's a fundamental problem with the story.  The instigating event of the movie is that she killed her husband.  Unless the US legal system recognizes the existence of ghosts - and agrees that she was possessed by that ghost - she's still on the hook for having killed her husband!
    There's no way around that!
    At the time she killed him, she had no idea that he was a murderer, and she had no reason to fear for her life.

    But the movie just ignores it.  We get a scene at the end of Halle Berry walking around a city.  Unless she somehow served her time, or unless getting discharged from a mental institution somehow absolves her of the crime, there's simply no way to feel good about this ending.


    I also have chosen to ignore other problems with the plausibility of the movie - like the idea that she would be added as an inmate in an institution where both the other prisoners and the staff all know her already.

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