"Winchester" feels like it should be perfectly timed. A ghost movie with a not-so-subtle anti-gun message showing up just as the tide appears to be turing in the US with gun control? With prestigious stateswoman of the screen Helen Mirren in the leading role? Based on a true story of one of the oddest buildings ever made?
Well, unfortunately this doesn't quite cut it. For a start, Mirren is a great presence when she's on screen, but she isn't on screen nearly enough. Our central character instead is Jason Clarke, a doctor brought in to assess the sanity of Mirren's Sarah Winchester (heir to the revolver company's fortune, and builder of an extrordinarily excessive mansion). Given we've shown up for a ghost movie, there's not a lot of suspense about whether he's going to find her belief in ghosts abnormal or not, and Clarke doesn't really give his protagonist a particularly large chunk of charisma to carry him over. Sarah Snook as Winchester's daughter in law holds her own admirably (although she and her kid are virtually shuffled off into a side plot with little impact on the rest of the film). Alas most of the scares are strictly of the "boo" variety, and while the house itself looks nice, it never really becomes a separate menacing figure like other great locations in horror cinema have been able to become.
Instead, this is largely a generic misfire from the formerly solid Spherig brothers.
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