GOTHIKA

Let us say up front that GOTHIKA is fine bump-in-the-night horror fun. Director Mathieu Kassovitz, in his English-language helming debut, sets up some expert jump scares and some very disconcerting imagery, including a ghost that jerkily disappears from sight, along with more gruesome offerings. The scares are delivered with such gusto that they will carry most genre fans along on a wave of goosebumps.

However, disbelief is stretched to the breaking point, not by the ghostly story elements, but rather by the human factor. When we meet her, Dr. Miranda Grey (Halle Berry) is a respected psychiatrist who works with inmates at a woman's prison, where Miranda's husband Doug (Charles S. Dutton) is in charge; colleague Pete (Robert Downey Jr.) keeps putting the moves on Miranda, but she's happily married. Her biggest challenge at work these days seems to be getting inmate patient Chloe (Penelope Cruz) to face up to her feelings about having killed her stepfather after sexual abuse, rather than insisting that the Devil keeps raping her in her cell.

Miranda drives home one rainy night, swerves off the road to avoid hitting a battered, bleeding girl, sees the girl burst into flames and then Miranda wakes up in a psychiatric cell three days later. She is told that overwhelming evidence points to her having hacked her loving husband to death. As if this weren't enough, Miranda begins receiving spectral visits from the girl on the road, who is ghostly yet evidently tangible enough to carve bloody words into living flesh.

There's a lot of good creepiness in Sebastian Gutierrez's script, but once we find out what's going on, at about the halfway point, two things happen. First, we can't help noticing that GOTHIKA is derivative of a couple of other movies (to name them would be to give the game away). This in itself isn't too problematic similarities within the genre are common enough, it's the details that count but the execution of the first half makes little sense in light of what we learn. This is she/isn't she crazy game the filmmakers play can only work if they don't provide the answer relatively early on, which causes the whole tone to shift gears and moreover trashes what we have just seen. Given what we learn, Miranda's behavior is implausible, and real-world, non-comedic ghost stories need all the plausibility they can get.

Berry throws herself perhaps a bit too thoroughly into her role scene-by-scene. She and the filmmakers seem to be so eager to get us to guess what's going on with her mentally in the early sections that they don't appear to have thought out how this tactic conflicts with the answers they provide. Downey is enjoyably hangdog and raffish he actually does keep us guessing without ever overdoing it. Dutton is excellent and Cruz does a fine job as a woman in the throes of coping with something huge and mysterious.

GOTHIKA is fun in its own way and has a respectable quotient of shocks. However, a little more cohesion would go a long way here.