Gothika
Dir: Mathieu Kassovitz
2003
**
There are frustrations aplenty with Mathieu Kassovitz's 2003 Gothika, what does Gothika actually mean for starters? It has the same visual flare you come to expect from Kassovitz - who I believe is a truly brilliant director who has yet made a truly brilliant film, but he seems to have succumbed to what he believed the audience wanted rather than be true to his own creativity. The high-speed wobbly head thing had been done to death in horror film by 2003 and many of the eerie scene seemed reminiscent of every thriller made in the 1990s. So it's not quite a horror, not quite a thriller and not much of a murder mystery. Mixing pop-psychology and the paranormal hardly ever works, only the stupidly superstitious are ever convinced by it and even then they need some kind of back story to be interested. The performances are also best forgotten.