Winchester

Given the cast assembled and the events it's based on, I'm sure you'll forgive me for having at least some expectations for Winchester. Whatever those expectations were though, I can tell you right now, they weren't met. Winchester was massively disappointing, as by-the-numbers as you can get, and if it wasn't for a couple of good performances and the occasional decent effect, it would have literally nothing to offer.

Final rating:★★ - Had some things that appeal to me, but a poor finished product.

A movie as empty as a haunted house.

I fully understand the fascination with Winchester Mystery House, an old mansion that was born from Sarah Winchester's will and ideas: owner of a fortune linked to the firearm's industry, she thought she was being haunted by the ghosts of people killed by these weapons and was advised by a medium to live in a mansion that was always being remodeled, with rooms and divisions permanently being added or demolished in an apparently random way. Sarah Winchester truly believed that she would be killed if she stopped or finished the building, so the house was only completed (obviously unended) with her death, and then opened to the public as a tourist attraction. It's a fascinating, curious and bizarre story, but it took a long time to reach the cinema.

The movie, however, is not remarkable, being just another ghost story in a haunted house. The Spierig Brothers (directors and writers) do not bring anything new to their film, limiting themselves to using almost all the regular clichés of American horror, including static and scary images that appear out of nowhere (at quite predictable moments) for the usual jump scares. As a haunted house horror movie, I've seen better.

One of the biggest problems of the film is the poor script and the bad conception of the characters. The two brothers who wrote the script were so enamored with the mysterious house that they weren't able to create a really intriguing story around it, and its original inhabitant. Everything goes reasonably well from the point where the doctor arrives at the mansion, but the preceding story, which justifies his trip and stay at the place, is very far-fetched. On the other hand, the melodramatic twist at the end, involving the doctor and a ghost from his past, was predictable from the beginning and is very nauseating. Poorly written and almost without personality, the characters just appear, talk and disappear without our caring about them. And as if the trut...