The odd experience that is GOTHIKA demands recognition of its inspirations - One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest as directed by M. Night Shyamalan channeling Hitchcock, where the psychos may, or may not, see dead people. But no less odd is the film's very existence, which can be argued as groundbreaking from a number of perspectives. GOTHIKA is, after all, the first role taken by Halle Berry after winning her much-deserved Academy Award. (Her turns in Die Another Day and X-Men United were signed long before Oscar came along.) And as such, GOTHIKA signals the arrival of Berry as a Major Actress, her first Hollywood blockbuster where she is unquestionably carrying the film solo, her name alone above the title. There's also the historical precedent -- supernatural, big-budget efforts have never, ever, been hung on the shoulders of an African-American woman; that fact, that legacy, hangs in the air above Mathieu Kassovitz’s thriller, ghostly and menacing. There is a weight to GOTHIKA, but it is not onscreen; it is at the box-office.

A colleague of mine, the marvelous critic MaryAnn Johansen, aka The Flick Filosopher, regularly features something at her site she calls The Bias Meter, a guide to her personal predilections for actors, storylines, and directors. It's an incredibly ingenious tool that allows her to own up to the human failings that we critics are supposed to hide under the guise of impartiality. In deference to the spirit of The Bias Meter, I'll admit: I want Halle Berry to succeed. From the moment she appears onscreen as Dr. Miranda Grey, in natty sweater and swept-back hair, I am pulling for her. I want her to be the great actress she has hinted at becoming, those flashes of brilliance seen in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, in Bulworth, in Monster's Ball, in Jungle Fever. I applaud her first steps over the gender and color barrier that have kept black women from these roles in the past. I am pulling for her in a big, big way.

So it is not without some great degree of sadness that GOTHIKA, despite flashes of brilliance not unlike Berry herself, begins strong and finishes weak. As Dr. Grey, Berry is a psychotherapist happily married to a prison warden (Charles S. Dutton), but her cases have taken a toll. Tired and overworked (including a patient who sees the devil, played with raspy slithering by Penelope Cruz), she drives home one fateful night, and wrecks her car swerving to avoid a girl in the road. Waking up, Miranda finds herself on the other side of the doctor's chair...she is being held in a psychiatric ward, accused of brutally killing her husband. Blackout. So far so good.

As apparitions begin to pop up like weeds, the rapidly devolving Miranda is given showy sequences of craziness, which Berry devours like a starving man who has just crossed the desert. As an actress, she is formidable; her scenes, overwrought and underwritten, serve as big slices of emotional cake for her to feast upon. Her former friend and current therapist, Pete Graham (Robert Downey Jr.), serves as both ballast and brace in these scenes; an able team player, Downey brings a tenuous quiet to his role, doing his best to balance the wild energy of his co-star.

Screenwriter Sebastian Gutierrez (Judas Kiss) wants to have a deep, nuanced exploration of the boundaries between science and the supernatural, but his premise is missing a very important element: an ending. Lacking such, he fills the last half-hour with a shameless pilfering of horror cliches, including shadows under doors and an eleventh-hour reveal of the villain. The thoroughly trite finale diminishes all the interesting philosophic questions that had come before; audiences will be way ahead of Miranda at the film's climax, waiting for her to catch up. (The final nail in GOTHIKA's coffin is the shallow B-movie score by John Ottman, which telegraphs every moment of suspense well in advance.)

Despite these problems, GOTHIKA does have a number of shining moments, and they are largely attributable to director Kassovitz, who tailors ravishing style and technical wizardry into the story with dazzlingly exciting results. Rainstorms stop in mid-fall, then rewind; damp footprints from invisible feet pace the floor. Kassovitz, best known in this country for his celebrated debut La Haine (Hate) and as an actor, for his leading man turn in the art house smash Amelie, is a stylist and provocateur. In this, his first foray into Hollywood, he gently sidesteps the plodding elements of Gutierrez's script, instead imagining a vivid, eerie beauty inside this dire endictment of our mental health system.

The mix of superstar-on-the-cusp and French bad-boy director is both headshakingly odd and briskly refreshing -- they seem so unsuited to working together, but prove to be good partners. Both will find a minor place in the multicultural history books with GOTHIKA, which it deserves. Had the story they had to tell been made of sterner stuff, GOTHIKA might have been the revolution I, and they, were hoping for. As it is, it makes us all wait and wonder. And wait. And wonder.

Review text copyright © 2003 Mixed Reviews. All rights reserved. Reproduction of text in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express written permission of Mixed Reviews or the author is prohibited.

Back To Top | Home | Archive | E-Mail Harvest