Given that Dark Castle Entertainment was responsible for two of the very best horror films of the last fifty years (I'm speaking, of course, of Thirteen Ghosts and Ghost Ship), I knew that Gothika would be a work of greatness. And before you label me as insane. I'm being sarcastic because this film is almost as inane.

In Gothika, Halle Berry plays a psychiatrist who, after a strange chain of events, suddenly wakes up and finds herself on the other side of the wall. This is to say that she is now a patient (or prisoner) of the very hospital for the criminally insane, where she has enjoyed a successful career as a psychiatrist. As the film progresses, Berry frantically tries to piece together what actually occurred before she woke up in this nightmare.

The first fifteen minutes or so of Gothika is absolutely atrocious. The dialogue is painfully awful, and the fashion in which the cast deliver this material is downright laughable. But then, the movie becomes strangely compelling, as Berry struggles to figure out (along with we the audience) what the hell is going on.

Despite all my hope, Berry is not very good in this movie. In fact, she has turned into quite the overrated actress due mostly in part to here terrific work in Monster's Ball. Save for that picture, she has been merely adequete in some movies (see X-Men), and downright silly in others (see Die Another Day). She spends most of Gothkia running and screaming, and while she is good at crying and quite effective at acting scared, the biggest problem with this picture is that you never buy into her character because she never convinces you that she is anything more than Halle Berry acting scared. Berry never becomes this character. Most of this, however can be attributed to the weak writing. Robert Downey Jr. has some fun here, but in the end, his character is virtually irrelevant. I guess he does serve a small purpose, but to go into that would ruin this film's so called surprise. I did enjoy Penelope Cruz as a crazed patient at the psycho ward. She's spunky, and creepily effective.

What I really loved here is Mathieu Kassovitz's direction, particularly during Gothika's mid section. There are creepy happenings here and I did find myself getting sucked into the crazy goings-on. Kassovitz uses the mental hospital to his full advantage and while I'm certainly not suggesting that this guy is Stanley Kubrick, moments here did remind me of The Shining. The massive psychiatric ward serves as a character in the film, and quite the eerie one at that. I liked that Kassovitz never takes the easy shot here. The camera is always moving or gliding through a corridor, and that movement keeps the movie scary. After talking to a couple of friends and doing a little research, I found that this guy won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival a few years back for a picture called Hate. He shows great potential, and hopefully, he'll choose a better screenplay his next time out.

Sadly, this movie slips into the absurd in the final act, as the big surprise becomes clear. While the ghost story element comes full circle and the identity of the villain is revealed, I couldn't help but think I've seen all of this before. Of all the films this movie borrowed from (i.e. The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echoes, The Ring), the one I was reminded of most, was the slightly less silly Robert Zemeckis' ode to Hitchcock What Lies Beneath. Thankfully, Gothika provides more scares than the Harrison Ford/Michelle Pfeiffer thriller, but it also provides far more ridiculous lapses of logic.

So to sum up; the beginning of this movie is really dumb. The mid section is lean and creepy, and handled with true craftsmanship. The end of this picture is a letdown, with a final scene that is truly stupid. And Halle Berry is nothing more than adequate despite being extremely beautiful. In Monsterís Ball, Berry proved that she has the chops to get it done and I imagine that somewhere inside, she has another good performance waiting to get out, but weíve certainly yet to see it.

Gothika is Dark Castle Entertainment's best picture, but if you look at the rest of their resume, that's not really saying all that much.