Winchester Review

How did they get Helen Mirren for this???


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Welcome one and all to 2018! It's still cold outside, The Shape of Water has a ton of Oscar nominations, and January horror movies are still awful. This year we've had the pleasure of a new Insidious movie and... that's it. I honestly expected there to be more January horror movies because those are always some of the best worst ways to start off the new year. Hell, The Bye Bye Man was last January's horror shlock, and even though I saw it a couple of months late, it still filled the void of disposable, not scary in the slightest, entertainment.

Winchester may have released in February (barely), but make no mistake, it's a January horror movie through and through. It has cheap scares, jump scares, it's short as hell, and almost entirely forgettable. No jokes, I saw Winchester yesterday and I was struggling to remember if I saw it 10 hours later. That takes some real effort to be that forgettable.

Our story is actually based on a true story, and not in the way where most horror movies claim they're "based on a true story", but really not at all. Winchester details the late life of Sarah Winchester, a woman who inherited the Winchester Repeating Arms Company from her dead husband. The company mostly sold guns, and Sarah Winchester was convinced that she was being haunted by the spirits of everyone that her guns killed and that they were the reason that her husband died. Keep in mind that the Winchester was the preferred rifle of the Union int he Civil War, and you've got a lot of dead souls. So in order to appease the spirits and hide form them, she commissioned the Winchester House to be built in California, a massive seven story building under constant construction to confuse the spirits chasing her down and give herself some peace of mind. She eventually died in 1922 and the estate was turned into a tourist attraction and is now known as one of the most haunted houses in America.

It's actually kind of a brilliant premise for a horror movie. A woman who believes that she is being haunted by ghosts is compelled to escape them with an elaborate house while constantly communing with them for advice on how to build the house. It had all of the potential to be a slower more psychological horror movie like The Babadook or The Haunting, but instead everything went down the drain.

The movie actually doesn't revolve around Sarah Winchester, but instead a psychologist who's been invited by the company to psychoanalyze her and determine if she's really crazy or just an eccentric Helen Mirren. Nearly everything about this movie centers around this man coming to the Winchester House and "discovering" himself. He comes to grips with his wife's death, drug addiction, and not believing in ghost. Oh, and ghosts are real. They pop up all the time to scare him because, according to Sarah, he has the special ability to see dead people because he died and wow this premise got so dumb so fast.

Let's get the good out of the way. Helen Mirren is giving such a great performance here. I have no idea what strings were pulled to get Oscar winning Helen Mirren into a movie like this, but she still gives it her all. She sounds perfect, acts the part, and can make you believe in ghosts without ever having to see one jump out with a music sting. Jason Clarke is also fine as the psychologist, but his character is written so poorly that you won't be invested in a single thing he does.

Everything else? I wouldn't call the rest of the movie awful, but I would easily call it unambitious. It had such a great premise for a solid horror movie, and it took to easiest and the safest way out. Ghosts will pop around, they have scary makeup on, and the movie loves to pull the trick where a character will look at one spot, turn away, look back, turn away, then ZOMG A SCARY GHOST WITH A NOISE AAAAAAHHHHHHH. This happens in nearly every scene.

Other standard horror tropes pop up like a possessed kid, a super powered ghost that causes an earthquake, talks of demons, characters no one gives a damn about, and unitentionally hilarious moments. My favorite is when Helen Mirren calls for the little kid only for him to shoot a shotgun at her. Dumb? Yes. Funny? Oh you better believe it.

But at the end of the day, Winchester's greatest sin is that it's just dull. You could have done so much with this premise, and the directors took literally the safest route possible with it. No clever scenes, no interesting scares, so special message about the nature of grief and guilt, just a movie about a creepy old house with creepy ghosts. This was one of the most boring horror movies I've seen in years. It's not even hilariously awful as The Bye Bye Man, it's just too serious and too morose for its own good.

I guess it is technically proficient and there's nothing really awful about it, but is that really the bar we're aiming for? It functions, yes, but when a horror movie is too dull to even scare me once, it's just a waste. Winchester only runs at 99 minutes, so at least it's a short sit, but not even Helen Mirren could save this movie from being about as lifeless as the actual ghosts in it. Except that might be insulting the dead, so I'll just say this movie sucks.