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Gothika

Halle Berry is a psychiatrist who suddenly becomes a patient.

FILM FACTS

Starring: Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr., Penélope Cruz
Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Rating: R for violence, brief language and nudity
Genre: Horror, Thriller

Official movie site

See showtimes (R) 94 minutes

Grade: D-

Verdict: Scary in all the wrong ways...

By STEVE MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

We all know about Halle Berry's problems with driving. And we know about Robert Downey Jr.'s problem with drugs. Now, with “Gothika,” the Oscar winner and Oscar nominee join forces to reveal to the world the dark secret they both share: Neither one of them can read.

Nor, apparently, can such fine actors as Charles S. Dutton and Penélope Cruz . . . or their friends, families and agents, either. That's the only conclusion to draw from the laughably witless boogedy-boo movie they're in. Surely none of them would have signed on if they'd bothered to read Sebastian Gutierrez's lame, empty screenplay.

Berry plays Miranda Grey, psychiatrist at Woodward Penitentiary for the criminally insane. Her prime patient is Chloe (Cruz), who claims she's being raped by the devil himself every night in her cell. It's a story Miranda's boss and husband, Douglas (Dutton), calls “satanic meanderings.”

Driving home through a rainstorm, Miranda nearly hits a pale woman with matted blond hair — actually, a ghost who bursts into fake-looking CGI flames and puts a Vulcan mind-meld on the poor shrink. Presto, Miranda wakes up on the wrong side of a cell door in the penitentiary, unable to remember what happened after that encounter. Colleague Pete (Downey) fills her in, saying she went home and took an axe to her loving, now very dead husband.

The premise promises a psychological thriller that blends questions of sanity with hints of the supernatural. But that promise goes out the window, fast. Director Mathieu Kassovitz traffics in “Snake Pit” overkill, with tight close-ups of the harried Berry, freaking out in a gray-on-gray prison set dimly lit by fluorescent lights that flicker to signal the presence of that scuzzy blond, Bad-Barbie ghost.

This ghost doesn't just moan and skulk. Able to slice up Miranda's arm and fling her around her cell, she seems to have enough ectoplasmic oomph to simply go on CNN and air her ghostly grievances with Larry King. But then there wouldn't be a movie — not that “Gothika” really is one. It's more a series of cheap, ineffective scares that would have felt more at home as a mid-'70s TV Movie of the Week starring, say, Kate Jackson, Doug McClure and maybe Dennis Weaver in the Dutton role.

Kassovitz, an accomplished French actor (“Amélie”) and director (“La Haine”), seems to be enamored of American horror movie gimmicks, known to us in the States as “clichés.” But maybe it's just his attempt to distract us from the painfully silly mystery at the heart of the movie. It's a story with so many plot holes, you could drive President Bush's entire London motorcade through them. Instead of screams and gasps, the movie earned bored sighs and giggles from a preview audience. And that's scary.