Sarah Winchester’s residence as it is today.
Winchester (2018) is a vapid little horror movie built on the more substantial bedrock of the story of Sarah Winchester, widow of the heir to the Winchester fortune and 50% of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. She lived during the late 1800s to 1922; she lost her husband and only child to disease, and thereafter built what is today known as the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, CA, a veritable museum of Winchester’s life. We’ve visited it and, liking houses that have housed oddballs, had a ball, as Mrs. Winchester was quite the superstitious lady. A house on which construction proceeded 24/7 (or she’ll die!) makes for quite the collage.
However, this movie aspires to take us from this reality to the next, from life to the dead, and it really just flounders about. It’s not the cast’s fault: led by Dame Helen Mirren, they give it their best shot. The problem lies in a story which attempts to use Mrs. Winchester’s superstitious nature to launch into a paranormal horror story about her supposed guilty conscience about all the deaths caused by the rifles produced by her late husband’s company, and that leads to the ghosts of the slain arriving for a noisy little buffet dinner made of her soul.
But perhaps I jest.
There’s very little to find compelling, from the widowed psychologist devoted to rationalism until he isn’t, to Winchesters, Sarah, her niece Marian and her family, and a museum-worthy collection of Winchester rifles, all running around trying to round up all these ghosts, including that bloodthirsty one …
Yeah. I’m sure this appeals to some temperaments, but it’s just a little too silly for me.
But if you’re considering visiting the Winchester Mystery House, this might give you a taste of how the structure may have been before God’s hammer fell on it. Well, someone’s, anyways. It was damaged in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, and some of it has never been rebuilt.
But it’s fun. If you get a chance, go see the house. Don’t bother with the movie.
