Winchester is... definitely an interesting film. Would I say I loved it? Not really. Liked it? Yeah. This is a somewhat surprising reaction from me, though, considering what I think this movie is trying to do. Well, I shouldn't say it quite that way. It's more what I thought the movie was going to do, followed by what it did do. That's not me being bitter about not getting what I was expecting, either. What the movie is has just as much merit as what I thought it was going to be. So. The Winchester house. A strange labyrinth of twisty passages in the form of a house, built at the whim of a woman who's convinced it has to be done. Part of this DNA is obviously in Rose Red, and since the other half of Rose Red's DNA is The Haunting Of Hill House, I was almost expecting something akin to that level of ambiguity. Indeed, the first glimpse we have of our protagonist Dr. Price seems to be setting that up, as he's a psychologist with a laudanum habit who hallucinates a picture of a deer bleeding on his wall after taking a hit. He takes his stuff with him to the Winchester house, and there's an amazingly built-up jumpscare involving a fucking mirror that plays on the rule of three, but twists it just enough to manage to still scare me. Anyway just before that he takes another hit of the laudanum, and I thought this movie might be about that ambiguity. Dr. Price, sent to evaluate the sanity of Sarah Winchester, slowly slipping into madness himself and questioning his own reality and whether or not the crazy ghosts he's seeing are even real. This being my third movie about a twisty turny haunted house, I expected that to be what was going to happen.
That is not what happens. No, it's all real. The Winchester house is totally haunted as all fuck. This is when we get into what the movie's actually doing, and it's an interesting thing. It's all about haunting, in a way. Well, haunting and healing. What is a ghost? In this case, the restless spirits of people who died at the hands of Winchester-brand rifles. Sarah Winchester is drawing them to her, haunted by the guilt of the lives her brand has taken... and working to heal. To heal both her own sins, and the wayward spirits who linger on and spook. Some of them are more malicious than others, of course, so they get all chained up until they settle down. This is the point of the movie, and it's fascinating. It all goes wrong, of course, when a particularly strong malevolent ghost starts possessing Sarah's nephew and busting all the other ghosts out in ghost pandemonium. He's the ghost of a Confederate soldier whose brothers were killed by Winchester guns in the civil war, so he shot up their offices and died. Now he's back and pissed off and wants the Winchester line to die. Dr. Price is key to this, as he was involved in an almost murder/suicide involving his wife and he was technically dead for a bit when she shot him, with a Winchester, before ending her own life. This means that technically, Dr. Price is a wayward spirit drawn to the Winchester house for healing, and so is his wife. Dr. Price is haunted by grief over not being able to do more for her own mental health, and coming to the Winchester house does help him heal from this trauma of the past. He even kills the Confederate ghost guy with the bullet that "killed" him as some wild form of symbolism. Really, for playing with so many rad themes of healing and whatnot, I should love this movie. Alas, I only liked it. It's fine, though. Worth a watch if you don't mind jumpscares. A bit of a shorter one tonight, but I feel I put my heart into it so that's okay. Moving on!
No comments:
Post a Comment