Review of Gothika

Introduction

It`s new, it`s exciting, it`s another of those films that has probably passed most of you by. In the cinema just a few months ago, and now trundling quietly onto DVD, it`s Gothika.

Halle Berry stars as psychiatrist Dr. Miranda Grey, who works in a stereotypical hospital facility that only exists in films, the dark and forboding hospital with hi-tech doors, but which can`t cope during power cuts. Dr Grey has an accident whilst driving home (on a dark and stormy night) and ends up back in her own hospital as a patient. That makes sense doesn`t it? Putting someone who knows all their secrets in with them?

Can the good Doctor unconver the secrets locked in her own mind and end up back on the other side of the divide?

Video

A pretty good 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer greets us on this disc. This is a film full of darkness, dark scenes, thunder storms, poorly lit roads and power cuts. And then you jump to the clinical whiteness of hospital lighting. And then the power goes and it gets dark again. The vast majority of scenes have a blue look to them and this is intentional. Detail levels are very good particularly given all the darkness that`s on screen.

Audio

A DD5.1 soundtrack that performs as you would expect from this type of film. Lots of great atmospherics, lots of moody crashes of thunder and plenty of little moments designed to get you on the edge of your seat. Throughout this noise riot the dialogue is clean and crisp (although sometimes you wish it wasn`t - more on that story later).

Features

Once again a film that does nothing to fire the imagination gets a fully stuffed DVD.

We start with the commentary featuring director Mathieu Kassovitz and cinematographer Matthew Libatique. This is mostly a technical job talking about difficulties when shooting various scenes, lighting scenes and other such material. Not exciting, not good to listen to and one of my least favourite commentaries ever.

On The Set of Gothika is another of those extended trailers that try to pass themselves off as documentaries. It doesn`t really tell you anything interesting about the people involved, or anything that you might want to know about the film. Dull PR fluff.

Painting With Fire - a shorter featurette, but one which actually has something interesting to say, as it briefly goes into the use of special effects in the film.

Patients: interviews, drawings and notes - this is sort of supposed to be something to do with patients at the hospital, but it doesn`t really sit with the film or on its own. Another waste of time.

Making of the music video - the largest featurette goes on the smallest piece of content, a Limp Bizkit music video also featured on the disc. More interesting than some of the other stuff, but only just.

Behind Blue Eyes music video - Limp Bizkit`s cover of the song by The Who, the usual film tie-in music video.

Trailers - for the film as well as other DVD and cinema releases from the studio.

Conclusion

Oh dear. Another classic presentation over content job. The film looks very nice, maybe they won`t notice the fact that nothing`s happening. But you just can`t watch it. The characters (what little there are of them) are very two dimensional, and you really don`t care what happens to any of them, how it happens or why it happens. I mean imagine putting a psychiatrist in with their own patients. It defies logic. So does this film. Let`s just hope that Halle Berry stars in another good film soon.

In the end a pretty poor film gets an unjustifiably good DVD release. Picture and sound are both very good and some effort has been made with the extras despite the fact that there`s very little to get your teeth into. It`s just a shame that the main feature is just full of confusion, cliche and some terrible dialogue.