The horror genre has long been fascinated by instruments of death, from Saw’s increasingly outlandish Rube Goldberg machines to the tactile terror of Jack Torrance’s axe in The Shining. But has any weapon wrought more mass murder than the gun? It’s an interesting notion that Australian-American haunted-house horror Winchester lines up in its sights, before failing to deliver a killer blow.
The firearm in question is the famous Winchester rifle, patented in 1848 and featuring a self-loading mechanism allowing its users to dish out death more efficiently than ever before. Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren), the widow of the arms company’s treasurer, claimed to be haunted by the rifle’s victims after her husband’s death, ploughing her money into the 24/7 construction of an ever- expanding mansion to appease the vengeful spirits. It’s a ‘true’ story ripe for a screen adaptation. Our way into the tale is (fictional character) Eric Price (Jason Clarke), a former soldier-turned- self-medicating doctor who once caught a bullet in battle. Grieving his wife’s death, he’s summoned to the estate to assess Sarah Winchester’s sanity.
The set-up promises an interesting approach to the usual haunted-house tropes, but Winchester’s execution is disappointingly shaky. The Spierig Brothers, behind last year’s Saw reboot Jigsaw, have a good instinct for building tension but squander it on cheap and loud jump-scares, while rote horror clichés are indulged too heavily — self-rocking chairs, a creepy kid with a dodgy haircut, and blood-dripping paintings are all present and accounted for.
The real spectre at the heart of the film is Mirren’s Winchester, a black-veiled dowager who stalks her own hotch-potch asylum at the stroke of midnight, constantly battling to keep her guilty conscience at bay. It’s a treat to see Mirren go all-out in the horror genre, and she battles the creaky script with an always- watchable performance. Clarke is game too, injecting life into a potentially dull audience surrogate despite a distractingly inconsistent accent. His unreliability is signalled early on — is he really seeing spirits or just tripping off the laudanum?
Most frustratingly, after painting the Winchester rifle as an instrument of real-life horrors, nodding to its connections to slavery and colonialisation, the film conjures up an uncomfortable and unconvincing ‘the best way to stop someone with a gun is with another gun’ finale. It’s a contradiction that Winchester can’t recover from, ultimately souring its otherwise admirable intentions.
