Starring: Halle Berry, Penélope Cruz, Robert Downey Jr.

4 out of 10 stars

Gothika isn't really the right name for this wan Halle Berry thriller that imagines the horrifying repercussions of becoming a patient in your own asylum. Try Gothik-y or Gothik-ish, because no matter how hard it tries, this movie falls way short of the true style and spirit of anything gothic, and even an Anne Rice novice can tell you there's a big difference between lurking shadows and just plain pitch darkness. When the only gargoyle in sight is part of the logo for the production company, and a tattoo is a stand-in for any grotesque imagery, you know you're in for a very, shall we say, conventional ride. Even the televisions in The Ring had more menacing flair than anything in this movie.

Despite her well-received performance in Monster's Ball, where she got to scream, cry, flail about, break down, have fervent sex and all those things associated with italicized acting, Halle Berry has never been an actress to set the world on fire. At her best, she has a quiet poise and a sassy stare that leisurely but magnetically turn the camera towards her (look to the X-Men flicks for this power in full effect). Never a very subtle actress, she has to work hard to actually fill the screen once the camera's on her, and after the first half hour of Gothika, when she's finally incarcerated in a women's mental hospital, she does get to scream and let loose and ultimately yell "Yo, I'm here! Pay attention to me!" Until then, though, she gets no help from Mathieu Kassovitz's serviceable but lackluster direction, which is so laconic as to wonder whether an industrious assistant should have slipped him a Red Bull or some Jolt Cola to joggle some of that French ennui into action.

Kassovitz sets things up with some De Palma-esque tracking shots of Berry walking down the halls of the aforementioned mental hospital, a castle-style affair that's the one purplish thing in the movie and suggests (from the outside at least) a Hogwarts for the Magically Insane. Berry is "brilliant psychiatrist" Miranda Gray, who's working with a particularly hard, um, nut to crack, a surly gal named Chloe (Penelope Cruz in a glorified cameo) who insists she's being raped in solitary confinement. Married to the bullish head of the institution (Charles S. Dutton, all tailored suits and leering eyes), she's admired by the staff and trailed by puppy-ish fellow doctor Pete (Robert Downey Jr., very good in a nowheresville role) who all but leaps into her lap for affection. Heading home on a dark and stormy night, Miranda's run off the road by the apparition of a washed-out blonde girl; when she goes to investigate, she gets a mean case of transference when the girl bursts into flames and grabs her, infecting her with one monster fever. Miranda then wakes up three days later, a patient in her own mental ward where she's informed by hangdog Pete that, well, she took an axe and gave her husband forty whacks. With her fingerprints on the weapon and other damning evidence, she's currently in the institution's custody pending a murder trial. Oh, and they all think she's insane. Welcome to the jungle, baby.

Given the whole shrink-now-on-the-inside premise, you'd think this was a movie shot through with a healthy dose of paranoia and enough Kafka-esque atmosphere to make a cockroach itch. Alas, Kassovitz is so enamored with the metallic doors of his sets and the geometric lines of all the walls and stairs that he fails to get any suspense or momentum going. Someone should have told him gothicness is all about supine curves and burgeoning bulges, not straight lines and gray planes – even the "Not alone" warning that's inscribed in Miranda's arm looks like the logo of a hard-rock band, not a menacing message. Befitting this lack of imagination, Miranda goes through all her motions in a plaintive daze, and that stupendous psychiatric mind we've heard about never truly gets a workout; the closest is a Psych 101 thrust-and-parry with Downey that basically ends in a draw. Ultimately, Miranda's led obliquely by a ghost (a passive-aggressive one given to opening up her cell and then tossing her about it) to see the criminal permutations that led up to the good doctor's incarceration. Kassovitz does get the blood pumping a bit with a backwards version of the hatchet job that lands Miranda in the loony bin, but the mystery is far too easy to figure out, and the red herrings too glaringly obvious that all suspense is chucked out the window. Kassovitz must have known this was a problem, because the cheap scares and pop-up ghosts are ladled on with the regularity of a snooze alarm, to jolt viewers into remembering that hey, they're watching a scary movie!

And it's a scary movie without irony, it might be added. For Gothika to work, it needed the pizzazz of a Brian De Palma, who would have done wonders with the premise of an all-women mental institution with communal showers (never mind that supernatural bugaboo), or even Robert Zemeckis, who took What Lies Beneath from stock thriller into a beyond-campy la-la land where each jarring thrill was a bat to the face, a poke in the ribs and a shrieky-scary laugh. Zemeckis is credited as producer on Gothika, and the movie does schematically resemble a dirtier version of What Lies Beneath (sprinkled with ghostly gems from The Ring), though Michelle Pfeiffer got more sexual mileage out of pouting leer than Halle Berry does in a wet t-shirt. To capitalize on that Oscar win, Berry's going to have to pick scripts that don't have her saying, straight-faced, "I'm not demented, Pete, I'm possessed!" If her career takes a nosedive with more movies like this, Berry might be saying the same thing by way of explanation in a couple years.