However, disbelief is stretched to the breaking point, not by the ghostly story elements, but rather by the human factor. When we meet her, Dr. Miranda Grey (Halle Berry) is a respected psychiatrist who works with inmates at a womans prison, where Mirandas husband Doug (Charles S. Dutton) is in charge; colleague Pete (Robert Downey Jr.) keeps putting the moves on Miranda, but shes happily married. Her biggest challenge at work these days seems to be getting inmate patient Chloe (Penelope Cruz) to face up to her feelings about having killed her stepfather after sexual abuse, rather than insisting that the Devil keeps raping her in her cell.
Miranda drives home one rainy night, swerves off the road to avoid hitting a battered, bleeding girl, sees the girl burst into flames and then Miranda wakes up in a psychiatric cell three days later. She is told that overwhelming evidence points to her having hacked her loving husband to death. As if this werent enough, Miranda begins receiving spectral visits from the girl on the road, who is ghostly yet evidently tangible enough to carve bloody words into living flesh.
Theres a lot of good creepiness in Sebastian Gutierrezs script, but once we find out whats going on, at about the halfway point, two things happen. First, we cant help noticing that GOTHIKA is derivative of a couple of other movies (to name them would be to give the game away). This in itself isnt too problematic similarities within the genre are common enough, its the details that count but the execution of the first half makes little sense in light of what we learn. This is she/isnt she crazy game the filmmakers play can only work if they dont provide the answer relatively early on, which causes the whole tone to shift gears and moreover trashes what we have just seen. Given what we learn, Mirandas behavior is implausible, and real-world, non-comedic ghost stories need all the plausibility they can get.
Berry throws herself perhaps a bit too thoroughly into her role scene-by-scene. She and the filmmakers seem to be so eager to get us to guess whats going on with her mentally in the early sections that they dont appear to have thought out how this tactic conflicts with the answers they provide. Downey is enjoyably hangdog and raffish he actually does keep us guessing without ever overdoing it. Dutton is excellent and Cruz does a fine job as a woman in the throes of coping with something huge and mysterious.
GOTHIKA is fun in its own way and has a respectable quotient of shocks. However, a little more cohesion would go a long way here.
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