20 December 2022 | ERT: 1 min
In this 2003 classic, Halle Berry plays a desperate pychiatrist who gets possessed by one of her patients’ ghost. No matter how hard she tries, Halle Berry could not really kill the movie with her ham-like acting. Even though her screaming all the time easily exhausts the viewer, the plot holds firm with a so-so unexpected twist in the end. And there’s even a young Robert Downey Jr. somewhere. And Penelopé Cruz, I guess? Wasn’t really paying attention.
Asylums are one of the favourite locations of thriller writers, especially with sane characters diagnosed with some mental condition. This allows for the narrative to unfold in the telling of an unreliable narrator who at first seems like a reliable one. That places the audience into a suspenseful crux: “Who do I believe?” The visual designers of Gothika made sure that this duplicity pervades the whole movie with the extensive use of contrast between shadow and light. Gothika, as the name suggests, evokes a dark, apathetic institution with its filtered lights, enclosed spaces, and general lack of colours. Seemingly, the producers of The Machinist (2004) followed the concepts of Gothika in that.
Compared to its contemporaries, the visual effects were very much limited to a few seconds of CGI flames, in harmony with the 2000s filmmakers’ motto: the shorter the CGIs the better chance they don’t see it. What compensates for this cheap trick is the professionalism of the camera crew, especially that of Matthew Libatique, who had already worked and continued to work on similar movies with the same dedication to cinema (eg. Requiem for a Dream [2000] Black Swan [2010], mother! [2017]).
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