But it is still never clear why that works, and we never get to know the real architecture or layout of the house, which, with better directors at the helm, should clearly have become a character in the movie. There’s a whole arsenal of explanatory dialogue (the Spierigs share script credit with Tom Vaughan) involved in trying to set up and then solve the internal illogic of this ghostly plot, much of which involves hammering 13 nails into doors to seal off the rooms and contain the spirits. Watch Video: Helen Mirren Forces James Corden to Bow Down in Dirty 'Drop the Mic' In the meantime, Price begins to realize his own connection to the house, why he’s the one who’s been summoned there, and why the conservatory extension is off limits. Price (and the lumpen Clarke) the runaround, while her young nephew Henry (Finn Scicluna-O’Prey) - staying in the house with his mother (Sarah Snook, “The Dressmaker”) - is infected with evil spirits and sleepwalks off a roof. Mirren just looks like she hates being here.Įven Mirren’s lifeless Winchester is enough to give the opiated Dr.
It needed a bit more Bette Davis, a bit of sarcasm. Nor does she give it the whole Miss Havisham scary-spinster camp. She may have been the Queen, but she’s no scream queen. Mirren does her best to bring some gravitas to the role, although I’m not sure that’s what it needed. This “house that spirits built” is still around, known as America’s most haunted house, and apparently open for tourist visits, in San Jose (if you know the way, of course). Winchester’s spirit connection goes further: We discover that it’s the ghosts who are possessing her at night and “guiding” her to re-construct the rooms in which they were shot, so she’s forever adding to her house, drawing up new plans and ripping down extensions until the place becomes an Escher-like maze of stairways going nowhere, trap doors and dead ends. Even corporate diversification into roller-skate production isn’t without a ghostly victim or two.Īlso Read: 'Winchester' Enters Box Office on Sluggish Super Bowl Weekend
Her character, though, is caught in an alarming limbo, communing with the dead spirits gunned down by her company’s great legacy, the repeating rifle, the weapon which won the Wild West. Yes, even the door to the cellar no cliché left unturned in this one.Īlthough Price attempts to take control, he’s no match for Sarah Winchester, certainly not the way she’s played by Mirren, who lifts back her veil to reveal her grimmest game face, one that reads: Right, let’s get this nonsense over with as quickly as we can, shall we? Price’s recreational addiction to laudanum begins to seem like a very bad idea when he starts seeing ghosts in the mirror, every glance underlined by loud jump-scare music (composed by Peter Spierig), every doorway concealing a possible “Boo!” moment. Winchester’s mental state as the board of the rifle company seeks to wrest back control. Into this eccentric abode is sent San Francisco psychiatrist Eric Price, played by the potato-esque Jason Clarke. Watch Video: Watch First Teaser for Helen Mirren's Spooky 'Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built' Here, in an Australian-backed enterprise by the Spierig Brothers (“Daybreakers,” “Jigsaw”), the Oscar winner plays Sarah Winchester, a spinster all in black lace, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune who has now (it’s 1906) ensconced herself away in a big, ever-expanding house which is in a continual state of build and repair, all day and night. With 129 acting credits listed to her name on IMDb, it’s amazing to find Mirren hasn’t really done horror before, although John Boorman’s “Excalibur” was a bit scary, Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” was baroque, and “Red 2” and “Collateral Beauty” are a couple of shockers. Based on a true story - or as the movies guardedly put it these days, “inspired by true events” - “Winchester” hurls Dame Helen Mirren into her first horror movie.
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