The story of the Winchester house is the stuff that horror dreams (nightmares. but profitable ones) are made of. The American gun manufacture’s estate is something out of a Shirley Jackson story: a mansion in which Sarah Winchester relentlessly built new rooms and passageways to try and assuage the ghosts of people killed by her late husband’s guns. That’s a truish story, a classic slice of Gothic Americana, and an open goal for any filmmaker willing to adapt it. Unless it’s the Spierig Brothers, apparently.
While the Australian directors have one quality film, Predestination, the rest of their filmography consists of the funny (but not in a good way) vampire thriller Daybreakers, and the most forgettable – and best forgotten – attempt to reinvigorate the Saw franchise in Jigsaw.
Winchester is the worst of their crimes, as everything you see and hear is a brutal waste. This story is begging for a great modern adaptation, and the
A cast including Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, and Succession’s Sarah Snook try their best and fail miserably to give the script some life, with the plodding dialogue and utter lack of interesting characterisation giving less “slow-burn atmospheric gothic thriller” and more “if you squint really hard, you can sort of see something happening in the back of the frame”, but that’s far from the most frustrating waste here. No, the worst of it is that Winchester wastes its biggest strength: the house itself.
That’s right, the movie is shot in the real Winchester house, an aspect that the marketing made a case to underline. And yes, the house really is as rich a location as it sounds on paper – you only have to check out one of the many tours and paranormal investigations of the house to see it, and maybe that premise would have been a better approach to this movie than the one we got (a Grave Encounters-style mockumentary could have really made the most of this setting, I think).
But the Spiergs fail to squeeze an inch of atmosphere out of the place. Instead Winchester is just another jump-scare dull fest that has nothing to say about guns, ghosts, or, y’know, anything that made making a movie about the house and its eccentric owner. Taking a more serious approach to a house that is allegedly haunted by the victims of the very guns that it’s owner created could have made for a powerful and impactful commentary on gun crime, and I wonder if getting the rights to shoot in the actual house led the creators to going for a less-critical approach than they might have otherwise.
Bu, whatever the reason, Winchester is a waste – of a great setting, a great cast, and a great premise. It wouldn’t even make the grade as a sub-par Supernatural episode.
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By Kevin Boyle
(header image via IMDB)
No But Listen 