There’s truth to that old filmmaker’s warning: endeavour to make your film as impervious to the zingers of critics as possible. Don’t give it some title those old groaners can pithily turn into a self-reflexive barb – give ‘em half a chance and they’ll turn Point Break into Point Broken; Non-Stop into Make It Stop.
Not that the Spierig brothers, the horror maestros behind Jigsaw and the recently-released Winchester, were ever going to be able to steel themselves against the slurs of critics. Firstly, they make horror films, which mainstream writers are famously and aggressively sniffy about, and, secondly – and perhaps more devastatingly – they’ve just made a film about real-life multi-millionaire Sarah Winchester, the heir to the gun fortune of the same name. So, what chance did they ever have against a horde of pun-happy critics who have rushed to call their rifle-related film everything from a “misfire” to a “blunt weapon” to “two barrels of awful”?
Winchester certainly doesn’t break the mould.
It’s unfortunate. Winchester certainly doesn’t break the mould – it relies too heavily on the template set by James Wan’s elegant and ridiculous The Conjuring films for that – but in its occasionally laughable soupiness, it has a charm and colour all of its own.
The set-up is tantalising: Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren), convinced that she is being haunted by the victims of the repeating rifle that has made her fortune, holes herself up in a creaky old house that she has custom-built to keep in the spectres. Accompanied by Eric Price (Jason Clarke), an initially supernaturally-resistant doctor sent to test her mental acuity, Winchester confronts her oppressors, works to overcome the grief prompted by the loss of her husband, and finally takes control of her destiny.
Listen, nobody said Winchester was Shakespeare, and it never pretends to be.
Oh, did I mention she achieves all this by literally shooting ghosts with a rifle? Listen, nobody said Winchester was Shakespeare, and it never pretends to be – the film is at its most successful when it drops its The Changeling-esque facade of super-seriousness and leans into its strangest impulses. A showdown with a snarling ghost is more Ghostbusters than it is The Amityville Horror, and the Spierig Brothers clearly relish encouraging the well-regarded and steely Mirren to play proceedings as though she’s wading through a deluge of cheese, chewed-up scene stuck between her teeth.
Sure, Clarke is as dull as anyone with even a scant knowledge of his career will have come to expect by now, and the finale is a bit of a mess, but who cares? Measured by its gleeful chaos alone, Winchester is a bizarre joy; a ramshackle pleasure as haphazard as the house in which it is set.
Winchester is in Australian cinemas now.
