Remorse closes in on the inhabitants of a haunted mansion in the latest film from the Spierig brothers. Academy-Award winning actress Helen Mirren is the heiress of a gun fortune tormented by the spirits of her victims and Jason Clark (The Great Gatsby) is the doctor assigned to assess her suitability to run the company. Based on the real life Sarah Winchester and her estate, it is set in San Jose California in 1906, where the shadows and guilt of the Civil War lurks in each cranny and nook but the present day “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” debate is as relevant as ever.
Indeed, what begins as a mystery surrounding a redheaded family and their curse that confines them to the house divulges into an exposition of whether or not there is life after death, and how best to reach closure after directly and indiscriminately being responsible for the deaths of others. There are the expected jump frights and children-of-the-corn-esque demises into demonic possession we’ve come to expect of ghost stories. Before the candle goes out in the darkness, there are enough glimpses that we should not have been privy to and before long this unbelieving doctor is wielded into the supernatural superstition that he scoffs at.
Helen Mirren has enough snappy dialogue and wit to sustain her character, but at times she crosses into the zany and ostensibly comical domain of a widow who suspects she may be committed but does not care. We are given small insight into her own personal grief, but is done away with in quick exposition and before long she’s projecting the motif of a bullet and what it represents onto the physician who is somewhat predictably entangled to one of the spirits of the house in his own way.
Fear and the all-consuming nature of grief should be controlled, and not through human fantasy or a self-imposed prison. For a ghost story, it delivers, but just like the questionable sanity of the protagonist, the genre of a horror/historical fiction is perhaps lacking in range and accuracy.
Verdict: 6.10
Studiocanal
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