The movie follows Doctor Eric Price (Jason Clarke), a womanizing drug addict with a tragic past, as he is hired by the Board of Directors for Winchester Repeating Rifle Company to assess the mental facilities of Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren). Sarah Winchester owns 50% of the company’s stocks, so Price is to determine if she is fit enough to remain in control of the family business. It’s clear that the Board would really like it if Price would find Mrs. Winchester unfit, as they blatantly offer him more money if they get that desired result, and so Doctor Price enters this job on very dubious footing, but I guess when you are a laudanum addict you take whatever jobs come your way.
“I may be in an unethical situation, but I’m also a bit of a jerk.”
Sarah Winchester is the widow of famed gun manufacturer William Wirt Winchester, and heir to the vast fortune the sales of these weapons of death have accrued over the years. Because of this, Sarah is under the belief that she must continually add rooms to this sprawling mansion, with construction running day and night, so that it can house all the spectral victims of the Winchester Rifle. She tells Price that this helps spirits find peace — why being stuck in a small room in a weird mansion would bring peace to a ghost is never fully explained — but for those spirits too angry to move to the other side, well she locks them in their rooms, using a board and “thirteen nails” to keep them caged.If only the Ghostbusters new it was this easy.
Clearly Sarah Winchester is nuts, or at least certifiably eccentric, so giving the Board of Directors their desired result should be no problem, but then Price himself starts seeing ghosts. At first, he takes the fleeting images of creepy apparitions to be hallucinations brought on by his drug use, but then later, when his laudanum is confiscated, he chalks them up as symptoms of withdrawal. What follows is series of scenes where Price stumbles down dark hallways — ones often inhabited by Helen Mirren doing her "Woman in Black" impressions — with the occasionally ghostie arriving to pop out and say BOO! At no point in the film’s 90 plus minute run-time does anything even remotely scary occur (I do not count cheap jump scares as true scares), and as this movie is set in one of the creepiest houses in the world, that’s a considerable achievement.How can you fail to make this place scary?
The film is not helped by legendary actress Helen Mirren, as the infamous Sarah Winchester, who is clearly in Boat Payment Theater Mode, and I’m assuming Jason Clarke did this film just to have a worse entry on his IMDB page than Terminator Genisys, but the fault really must be laid at the feet of Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig, who both wrote and directed this thing. Making a horror movie about “The House That Ghosts Built” should have been a cakewalk, but somehow they failed, and making it a historical period piece may have been the key problem, as they veer wildly from historical fact to their own nonsensical backstory.Now, I’m not one who demands that historical films stay completely true to the actual events they depict, and certainly not when said film is a horror picture, but major plot points the Spierig Brothers come up with fly right in the face of facts. A key example of this comes in the form of the “angry spirit” harassing Sarah and her family. He is a Civil War soldier, whose brothers were killed in the war by a Remington rifle, even though the first Winchester lever-action model did not appear until after the war. We then learn that the surviving brother later walked into the Winchester Showroom and massacred dozens of people, which is another completely fabricated event — and all of this I could have forgiven if at any point something even vaguely scary would have happened.
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