THE VEDOVA WINCHESTER
Dr. Eric Price has recently lost his wife and, consequently, his faith in everything. He spends his days drowning in the laudanum when he is recruited by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company to perform a psychiatric examination of Sarah Winchester, the widow of the arms factory and a fifty percent shareholder of the company. The woman, haunted by the sense of guilt for the millions of deaths that her guns have caused, has moved to San Jose, California, where, day and night, she works on the construction of new rooms in her home, in the belief that they are the spirits themselves to ask him. The story of Sarah Winchester, irretrievably interwoven between truth and legend, is one of the most suggestive of its kind, impregnated as it is of the material of which cinema is made: visions, ghosts, beliefs and disbelief.
In 2016, Bertrando Bonello built on these foundations an "opéra fantôme", a short film of powerful charm. Here, however, adopting the point of view of an unreliable narrator, obnucated by the poison and the psychological suffering caused by mourning, the directors immediately show they want to operate within the horror genre in a traditional way and continue this step with clocks that mark midnight and children who walk sleepwalkers at that hour. The meeting at the center of the film is, however, that between the two tormented souls of the protagonists, of which the ghosts that infest the mansion of San Jose could be emotional projections, were it not that the story never rises above the lines, for remain anchored to the stipulated promise, that of the ghost story, which prevents the film from proposing itself with an additional interest, beyond the successful attempt to frighten and the reconstruction cured and atmospheric.
Helen Mirren, perfectly at ease in the role of the Queen of England, and Jason Clarke, in the role of the psychiatrist chosen by the widow herself, go from confronting herself to support, with theatrical devotion to the cause, within a written path at the start, mostly enjoyable, just because of its classicism, but ballasted by some commonplace too. To be a ghost story, it could take us more by surprise.