The heiress to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune believes her sprawling estate is haunted by the ghosts of everyone killed by Winchester rifles.

HORROR

Winchester (2018)

Directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig

Written by Tom Vaughan, Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig

Starring Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, Sarah Snook, Finn Scicluna-O'Prey, Angus Sampson, Eamon Farren, Bruce Spence

---

Connor Eyzaguirre

November 4, 2020

4/10

The true story of the Winchester House is fascinating. Sarah Winchester, heiress to the company fortune, is wracked with tragedy and believes the spirits of the victims of Winchester rifles are killing her family. To keep the spirits at bay, Sarah commissions an endless construction project. The Winchester House has hundreds of rooms, most of which go nowhere, because Sarah believed that if construction stopped, she would die. Today, it's considered one of the most haunted mansions in America. Instead of diving into the historical and psychological ramifications of this story, the filmmakers decided to make a generic ghost thriller with no interesting characters, very little story, and absolutely no scares. What a waste of potential.

In the fictional version of this story, Sarah Winchester (Mirren) is considered mentally incompetent by the Winchester Rifle Company, who send a doctor to confirm their diagnosis. This doctor, Eric Price (Clarke), is a depressed laudanum junkie with his own psychological issues. As the film progresses, he starts seeing the ghosts that we all know are real, and for some reason, only he and Sarah can see them. The climax is so "by the numbers" and dull that it's very difficult to maintain interest. I found myself nodding off many times throughout this movie, as most of it is boring dialogue that barely advances the plot.

Winchester could've been a great combination of fact and fiction, almost like the Fire in the Sky for ghost movies. But nobody cared about telling a good story here. Winchester is a very weak, awful movie that steps on this intriguing historical anecdote and never bothers to be interesting. A complete and total letdown.