With Oscar-winning actresses and an Oscar-nominated actor in its cast, Gothika should have been great. Instead, it sits at 15% on Rotten Tomatoes and didn't fare too well with audiences either. How did something set up for greatness end up doing so poorly?
Gothika follows psychiatrist Miranda Grey (Halle Berry) in her daily life at a mental hospital working alongside her husband Doug and friend Pete Graham (Robert Downey, Jr.). She wakes up one day admitted to the hospital herself under the care of Pete after being accused of murdering Doug. She's no longer caring for her patient Chloe (Penelope Cruz), but lives side-by-side with her. Miranda slowly begins to make sense of what is happening to her and realizes her husband may not be the man she thought he was.
On paper, Gothika seems like it should have worked, but there was just something that didn't click. Namely, the story was completely adrift, losing the audience almost immediately. That's something that even the best cast cannot save.
The bottom line of the supernatural horror movie is interesting. A successful psychiatrist ends up locked in her own mental hospital with no memory of the crime she allegedly committed is an enticing plot. However, that simple baseline was spun too far out of control. Supernatural elements were piled on top of the basic premise, causing the story to meander in a number of different directions. Gothika eventually reveals that Miranda's husband raped and murdered girls for his own sadistic pleasure. Miranda eventually comes to the realization that she did technically kill Doug. However, there's an added twist: it was the ghost of one of his patients that possessed her body to use Miranda as an instrument for the murder. The inclusion of this ghost adds confusing elements to the story. For one, the spirit causes Miranda to carve "NOT ALONE" into her arm, which she somehow comes to realize means that her husband had multiple victims. As Gothika's ending shows, that possession gave Miranda the ability to see all ghosts who met a tragic and violent end.
If the horror movie cut the supernatural elements of the story, the movie could've worked. Those plot points were poorly executed, which caused them to overshadow the movie's talented cast. Simply crafting the movie around Miranda's admittance to the hospital with her investigation on what happened would have allowed for a more performance-driven movie, which someone like Berry could have pulled off well. Beyond Berry's performance, a more character-driven movie in general is something a cast of this magnitude easily could have handled. Instead, Gothika will likely always be remembered by fans as that shockingly bad Halle Berry horror movie.