“Winchester” is inspired by the actual events surrounding Sarah Winchester; the widowed heiress to the Winchester Arms Company, who inherited $20 million dollars upon her husband’s death in 1881 (an approximate value of $500 million today).
Her dabbling in the occult brought her to the very brink of mental sanity, and her infamous residence, the Winchester Mansion in San Jose, CA, where she had construction crews working 24/7 to build and extend rooms and hallways for no other reason than the appeasement of ghosts and her personal demons.
The 2018 Spierig Brothers film “Winchester” attempts to tell the story with the inclusion of a fictional side plot; that of a psychologist named Eric Price hired by the Winchester company board of directors to spend a week in the mansion and make the determination whether or not she is mentally fit.
Academy Award winner Helen Mirren plays Sarah Winchester, and does so in an intriguing fashion. Sarah Winchester is a reclusive sort whose mind is said to be as chaotic as the house she reigns in itself. Mirren won Best Actress for her role in “The Queen” and here demonstrates that she is a seasoned actress with excellent talent who for some reason stooped to a role in a movie like this.
Opposite Mirren is Jason Clarke as Dr. Eric Price. Clarke is an unheralded actor who I really liked a lot in this movie. Dr. Price has a deep back story involving the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his wife. Clarke offers us a true sense of the pain he is in as the character is seen taking to the bottle, among other things. The element of Dr. Price’s inebriation works well throughout the first half of the movie, as we are left wondering if the images he sees inside the mansion are the work of the supernatural or just his own drunken hallucinations.
In fact, the scares at the movies onset are actually quite good. They are jump type in nature, but I will readily admit I didn’t see a lot of them coming, and even when I did, they still managed to get me. One early scene with Dr. Price readying for dinner in front of an antique swivel mirror is truly good, and evidence that the Brothers’ Spierig have the chops to tell a scary story if they choose. 
Sadly, the second half of the movie is a bust. The unknown legitimacy of the haunting in the first half is what works well; you watch and are unaware if the ghosts and visions are real or just the result of a stressed mind a bottle of booze. But once the deep and ridiculous explanation of the ghosts is introduced, the remainder of the film is a snoozer.
Ancillary characters like Sarah’s niece Marion (Sarah Snook) and her annoying son Henry have little in the way of depth or value. Other characters are introduced for no other reason than to dispose of them when the time comes.
“Winchester” fails to live up to its potential, and doesn’t adequately tell the story of Sarah Winchester either. It doesn’t work as horror, or biography.
by – Matt DeCristo
