Gothika (2003)

Math doesn't lie, and a full 15% of the nation's critics agreed there was something worth watching in Halle Berry's 2003 horror film, Gothika. Indeed, if you look beyond the hilarious dialogue, the exhausted horror movie tropes, and the sheer existence of Penelope Cruz, you may well discover the movie contains three whole scary moments:

1) The shot where Halle Berry's Miranda sees a girl on a dark road, gets out of her car to help, and awakens after four lost days to find herself committed to a mental institution.
2) The shot where a now crazy Miranda sees the girl from the highway for the first time after becoming crazy.
3) Penelope Cruz's brokedown face.

The other 97 minutes of Gothika do not fare quite as well.

The terrible premise: Halle Berry plays Dr. Miranda Grey, a no-nonsense psychologist who works in a mental institution that resembles an underground bondage club from the not-too-distant future. When we first pop in on Dr. Grey, she is counseling Chloe (Cruz), a patient so around-the-bend crazy she utters lines such as "You know about my stepfather. You know I cut his throat. I cut his Adam's apple in half, like a piece of fruit on a summer day, so he wouldn't say a word. I sat next to him and watched him die... slowly." After the session, Miranda walks around the building and professionally gives orders to underlings, striding confidently down the halls of the asylum. In fact, she spends approximately eight out of the film's first ten minutes just walking. Walking competently like a true mental health professional, mind you. But still, just walking. This might have been as good a time as any for the closing credits to roll.

Though Chloe's blatant admission of murder is never retracted, she is still let go at the end of the film (spoiler!). We mention this strange plot development at this point to highlight the fact that releasing a psychopath onto the streets is still, somehow, not the institution's most egregious ethical lapse. Gothika drops into farce way earlier than that, when Miranda becomes a patient at the asylum in which she had only days before been a doctor, and her former colleagues (including Robert Downey Jr., who seems to have wandered around the set holding a coffee cup until someone finally decided to put him in the movie) become her doctors.

Miranda experiences a few moments of clarity, during which she attempts to tell the doctors she isn't as crazy as she seems, that there really WAS a scary girl in the road who now possesses her. But, as Chloe warns her, "The more you try to prove them wrong, the crazier you appear." When Miranda finds a framed photograph of the girl and rants that this is the girl who stood in front of her car that night on the dark road, she is told in no uncertain terms that she could not have seen that girl. No way. Not that girl. Not on that road. Not on that night. Not possible. Can you guess why? The movie tells us in one thuddingly non-spine-tingling line: "She's dead." If you couldn't see that one coming, you too may be crazy.

Ultimately, the movie descends into one cheap scare tactic which stops working after the first time you see it. Every time the music gets scary and the lights grow dim, Miranda is once again startled by... the same dead girl, over and over again. Boo. But of course, in the end, our heroine convinces the world that she's not crazy at all and that ghosts came into our dimension and made contact with the living just so they could tell her that Charles S. Dutton is a bad guy. Or something. As the credits roll, we all walk away learning that the crazy people are really the normal ones after all. And it would be a valuable lesson the filmmakers spent $40 million teaching us, had we not already learned it during season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Gothika stands as the worst crime three Oscar nominees in one movie could perpetrate on the filmgoing public. At least until we get around to screening All the King's Men.

Recommendation: Watch the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes.