A staggeringly pointless supernatural non-chiller featuring some very tiresome jump scares. People with latex skin conditions and demon-eyes are always JUMPING! out at you out of nowhere and then disappearing, leaving behind the same atmosphere of listless boredom.
There’s a hog-whimperingly silly performance from Helen Mirren; she sports a sub-Queen-Victoria widow outfit and a brow-furrowing, lip-parted expression of grieving concern, wandering in front of the camera and looking round at the furniture with a kind of baffled disapproval, as if to murmur: “What is this place? What am I doing here? A film, you say? My fee was not big enough to justify me having to appear in it.”
The film is based on the true story of Sarah Winchester (played by Dame Helen), widow of the inventor of the Winchester repeating rifle. After her husband died in 1881 leaving her with a vast fortune, she assuaged her blood-money guilt by building a mansion, obsessively extending it with numberless weird passageways and hidden rooms to house the bullet-ridden ghosts of people shot by Winchester rifles. Because a medium told her to.
This movie imagines a troubled doctor (Jason Clarke) being invited by the Winchester board of directors to “assess” Mrs Winchester’s psychological state, so that control of the family firm can be wrested away from the crazy old woman. But it means him staying in the haunted house with her, and things get scary, or rather jump-scary, which is to say not scary at all.
A sleepwalking child stumbles off a ledge at one point and Clarke manfully catches him. No one is particularly grateful or even interested. Perhaps if Dame Helen had jumped and Jason had caught her that would have livened things up.
