Gothika

Too muddled to be taken seriously, too campy to be scary, Gothika exists in some cinematic neverwhere that finds its various actors seemingly performing in completely different movies that coexist from in a filmic multiverse. Stylish to a fault, it’s always a red flag when a film has too much going on and at maximum volume, yet it’s not quite capable of pulling off the hat trick of zooming around terrible towards being ironically entertaining. Is Gothika a ghost story, one of possession, of a character suddenly capable of supernatural communion? The answer to all these questions is yes, as the script wanders wherever it needs to at any given moment to propel the plot forward without any thought to its interior logistics.

A criminal psychologist gets into a car accident on a rainy night only to awaken as a patient in the former hospital she once worked at. Of course, there’s a deeper mystery that dovetails with her murdered husband, missing young girls, the ghost of a straggly blonde, and too nice to not be suspicious cop. Oh, and there’s also a patient claiming to be raped by the devil and a former colleague that’s in love and rooting for our frail heroine to come out on top, in more ways than one.

If any of that sounds borrowed from other, better horror movies, that’s because it is. Gothika merely regurgitates tropes and images from various canonized classics in the genre without a coherent thought as to why and how these things are being deployed. Halle Berry gives sweaty intensity, Robert Downey, Jr. is laconic, John Carroll Lynch is genial until he’s required not to be, and Penélope Cruz goes completely looney in a scenery-chewing performance that must deliver the lion’s share of groan-worthy whoopers. Gothika is mindless garbage, but Cruz manages to give it a campy elan that almost makes the journey worthwhile.