Winchester

 Winchester

Released in 2018, Winchester is a horror film inspired by the "true events" at the Winchester Mansion, which has been hailed as the most haunted house in history.   The film is also known as Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built, and is about Sarah Winchester and her house that she continuously built and added to throughout her life, and supposedly ghosts were telling her to build.   I wonder if this might have been Stephen King's inspiration for his miniseries event Rose Red about a house that ghosts built.  In this film a doctor named Eric Price is hired by the Winchester Repeating Firearms Company to assess Sarah Winchester's mental state to see if she is still in sound mind to be half owner of the company.  

Winchester is directed by the Spierig Brothers, and has a screenplay written by the Spierig Brothers and Tom Vaughan.   The film was distributed by Lionsgate and CBS Films and was a box office success grossing $46 million against its $3.5 million budget.  However the film was a critical failure, receiving generally negative reviews by the critics, and holds a low score on online review sites such as Rotten Tomatoes.   

Winchester stars Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester, Jason Clarke as Eric Price, Sarah Snook as Marion Marriott, Finn  Scicluna-O'Prey as Henry Marriott, Bruce Spence as Augustine, and Eamon Farren as Benjamin Block.  The film is well cast, it isn't really the fault of the characters for this film being a critical failure.   What went wrong with this film I think is that it's pace is so slow that a snail would get bored watching it, and though there are some decent effects and scares in the film, there is endless scenes of dialogue that just go on and on and on and...   When films with sound were first developed they were called "Talkies", this film takes that very literally, because all it is is a continual blabbering.   Lots of dialogue and slow pacing aren't always the death of a film, and sometimes they are effective, IF done properly, which they are not in this film.

Of Course, this is not to say that this film is all bad.   There are many things that Winchester does right.   At its heart it is a version of the classic haunted house theme that is common in the horror genre, though many other films have done it much more successful, such as Rose Red, The Haunting, The House On Haunted Hill, The Old Dark House, etc.   However this film is absolutely beautiful visually, the sets, the costume designs, and way that the film was shot all are beautiful.  The film primarily utilizes practical effects, and they look amazing, in a world of poorly done CGI effects to create scares, Winchester chooses to keep the effects practical, and in my opinion it pays off really well.  Honestly, if someone could go in and cut much of the endless chatter, and keep it the film focused on being a haunted house story, this film could have been amazing.   I feel like the story wants to be a traditional haunted house horror story, but the directors keep trying to force it to be a historical drama.   Again, that is fine, there is nothing wrong with historical dramas, but this story feels like it doesn't want to be that, it feels like it wants to scare the audience with a great haunted house story, but the poor ghosts are being locked away and murdered by a boring story.   I love the movie that this film wanted to be, but the final product that was shown on the screen is a barely watchable bore of a horror drama.   Many critics called the film "pointless", I don't think that it was pointless, I just think that the point was just so muddled and lost in the forced drama, that the film failed as a horror story, but there is a great horror story, there is a great haunted house there in that muddled mess, that is just begging to come out.   I know that it isn't a thing, but I with the directors could go back and sort it out and create the great film that is buried within this bore.

If you haven't seen this film, I urge you to not bother.  Like I said, it is visually beautiful with some wonderful effects and a great potential horror story, but if you want a haunted house drama I might suggest instead watching Season One of the American Horror Story, all of the great drama without getting sorely boring, or go watch Stephen King's Rose Red, which also feels like a historic drama with a great horror story.   I love a good haunted house film, hell I even liked the Haunting remake starring Liam Neeson, but the scariest thing about Winchester is the directors ability to mercilessly murder a horror story that had amazing potential.