Winchester (2018): A Self-Righteous, One-Sided Think Piece

Winchester is one of the more irritating movies I've seen in the last year. It is a strawman argument dressed up as deep-thinking cinema, a movie too set in its ways to try and provoke anything beyond thoughtless agreement or vehement dissent. Worse, it has a holier-than-thou attitude that invades every corner and crevice of the story it's trying to tell. This is more than a bad movie: it is an arrogant Trojan horse that thinks it will save lives. Underpar filmmaking ironically keeps it from finding one to call its own.

Whatever your stance on gun control and other charged topics like it, no one will dispute that countless great movies have been made on provocative ideas. The most recent Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another, dipped its toes in the churning water of our civil and political turmoil and got rewarded for it. However, dealing with provocative subject matter alone doesn't make a movie good, and the difference between a good political movie and Winchester is that the latter doesn't offer natural or compelling reasons to include such hot topics. Even if I disagree with the conclusions, I'm always wary of giving a movie a poor review simply because its worldview differs from mine. But in this case, the themes are crammed into the movie more artificially and obnoxiously than a student bringing up politics in art class.

The Winchester lever-action is one of the most popular rifles in history, and now Sarah Winchester thinks she’s haunted by the ghosts of those killed by her husband’s invention. Mr. Winchester became very rich as one of the world's leading arms dealers, and he left Sarah an inheritance that she used to build a mansion; now, the ghosts of those slain by Winchester wielders have moved into the mansion out of sheer spite. The Winchester company eventually hires Dr. Eric Price to watch over Sarah, believing her to be unwell, but over time, Eric comes to see that Sarah is a perfectly sane woman with a very real connection to the supernatural. It's a shame she couldn't connect with her audience in the same way; more on that later.

This is a haunted house story, and the one thing it does well to an extent is its jump scares, occasions that start with a strange sound or movement - like a strange whisper from around the corner or a book moving on the shelf - before accelerating towards something sinister. The problem with these scares is that they are used far more and for far longer than they should be, and what starts as legitimately frightening becomes numbing and predictable the more and more it's repeated. As for Sarah's house itself, it’s just as unimpressive as the horrors lurking in it, one of the fakest-looking CGI creations I’ve seen in years. The brief glimpse of Victorian-era San Jose isn’t much better. Both look like a mixture of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s live performances of Hamilton and green-screen inserts, a mixture of meh that took me completely out of an already underwhelming experience.

As for Sarah herself, she’s supposed to be a tragic figure, but Helen Mirren’s Razzie-winning performance is abysmal. She addresses her “erratic behavior” at one point in the movie, and it made me ask myself, what erratic behavior? Mirren’s delivery is as flat as a pancake, and her facial expressions are virtually nonexistent. Some reviewers called her performance dignified. I think that’s a nice way of calling her boring with extra steps.

All of these underwhelming elements are trying to form a consolidated think piece on the pros of gun control. While I won’t go into much depth on how I feel about this particular issue, Winchester lacks subtlety, trying over and over again to cram the issue into so many of its scenes without coming up with a natural, justifiable reason for why it should be included at all. So much of its moralizing eventually becomes tiring, and I wish the movie had changed not necessarily what it tried to say, but how it said it. Winchester is little more than a sheltered liberal journalist’s opinion piece with the tropes of a horror movie thrown at the issue to make it feel more one-sidedly urgent than it actually is. There is no dialogue between parties here, no attempt to reckon the cultural divide associated with firearms—only a repeating of unchallenged ideas over and over again.

Believe it or not, I’m no longer a very politically charged individual; the issues I have no strong opinion on vastly outweigh those where I do. Still, the American Left needs to reckon with a unique flavor of self-righteousness that has seeped into its party's ranks. It is an arrogance that permeates Winchester, one either too afraid or too indifferent to challenge the pro-gun control stances it obviously believes are so airtight. How is one supposed to take this movie and its themes seriously if they’re not brave enough to open themselves to good-faith scrutiny, choosing instead to constantly strawman arguments and people they claim to be critiquing? It projects nothing but confidence, but the facade is all too easy to knock down.

Winchester is a stinker of a movie that dares to pretend it’s great. It is a cliched, one-sided excuse for a cultural critique too afraid to let its ideas stand up to much scrutiny, and it tries to take advantage of a hot topic – gun control – to court relevance when before, it would have had none on its own. The truth is that poor filmmaking is rarely relevant, so Winchester ends up back at square one, retreating to its dark corner to lob strawman fallacies at the issue of firearm culture in a way that screams the director of this movie surrounded himself with yes men while making this. Ultimately, Winchester lives with its head in the sand and its mind set on a morality infinitely more complex and dynamic than it is willing to admit. As a critic, I'm more than fine with a movie that isn't deep. I don't like the ones that pretend to be.

Winchester - 2/10

Matthew 26:52-54