The Spierig brothers’ new film, “Winchester,” which opens today, is a historical drama of sorts, a loose adaptation of the true story of Sarah Winchester, heiress to the firearms fortune, who was born around 1840 and died in 1922. It’s also a historical throwback in itself, a horror film in the way that horror films were likely to horrify in the inhibited time before the late sixties, with jumps and jolts of grotesquerie but without torture or gore or really anything that would cause squeamish viewers to cover their eyes. That’s doubtless due to a business decision: “Winchester” is rated PG-13, which sharply limits what can be shown and which leads to a rendering of violence that’s merely allusive, such as gunshots that don’t spatter blood and tissue but merely make people fall dead.
The constraints imposed by the desired rating seem to have helped the film. The directors, Peter and Michael Spierig (who made “Predestination” and “Jigsaw”), wrote the script with Tom Vaughan. They take an old-fashioned haunted-house tale and, without recourse to visually or sonically disgusting elements, build and unfold a story that’s largely centered on dialogue and that runs, above all, on an element of moral and political disgust. The action is set in 1906. Helen Mirren stars as Sarah Winchester, a colossally wealthy woman who maintains her mansion in San Jose, California, in a constant (literally) state of construction. She had bought it as a place of moderate size, and she keeps adding rooms and stories to it, based not on the designs of architects but on her own designs, resulting in a crazy quilt of styles as well as in practical conundrums, such as hidden passageways and blind corridors and staircases.
That part of the tale is true; the Winchester house exists to this day as a tourist attraction (and the year in which the movie is set invokes another true story that’s involved: the San Francisco earthquake). The drama that unfolds from there is based on an enduring myth. In real life, Sarah Winchester’s daughter died in infancy, and her husband died young; the myth holds that she considered herself to be cursed—by the spirits of those who died by gunshots from Winchester products—and that her obsessive renovation of the house was a form of expiation, on command from the spirits who demanded that she shelter them. The Spierigs—identical twins born in Germany, raised and working in Australia (where “Winchester” was made)—take this tale literally, with some metaphysical effects depicting the realization of that curse.
The setup is classical and creaky. A youngish San Francisco doctor, Eric Price (Jason Clarke), a laudanum addict who is himself in mourning for his late wife, Ruby (Laura Brent), is summoned by an unscrupulous businessman named Gates (Tyler Coppin) for an odd job. Gates represents the owners of a half-interest in the Winchester firm; Price is to be dispatched to Sarah Winchester’s mansion to become acquainted with her, and then to issue a report as to her mental fitness to run the firm. (Price is, of course, meant to judge her unsound, so that Gates’s employers can lay hold of her shares.)
Arriving at the mansion, Eric finds it to be run on rigid rules—and also finds it to be in a state of torment. Sarah’s niece, Marian (Sarah Snook), and Marian’s young son, Henry (Finn Scicluna-O'Prey), are staying with her, and Henry seems to have fallen prey to the house’s curse—he’s possessed of impulses that range from mean to self-destructive (and the Spierigs devise an eerie if conventional trope to signify their onset). So far, unfortunately, so dull. But, as Eric insinuates himself into the troubled life of the household (and comes up against some mysterious thumps and bumps and flash-frame apparitions), he also becomes acquainted with the grimly witty and intelligent Sarah herself, and their dialectical confrontations in her home office have a flair that owes much to Mirren’s sharply focussed, quiet grandeur.
It’s when Eric prowls around, late at night, in parts of the house that he’s told are off-limits, that the movie gets its one pure visual inspiration, one that’s based in Mirren’s gestural ingenuity: he spies on Sarah as she’s doing some architectural drawing in a state of visionary ecstasy akin to automatic writing. That moment unlocks the film’s sociopolitical inspiration: Sarah’s connection with the spirits of the victims of Winchester firearms has a practical basis in documentary research. She keeps voluminous and ever-growing files of newspaper clippings about gun killings (though how she knows of the Winchester connection isn’t made clear), and it’s the spirits of those victims who are guiding her hand in the drawings. Under their counsel and command, she’s reconstructing the rooms in which they were killed.
But of all these spirits, one is the angriest, the least reconciled, and the most violent: the spirit of a man named Benjamin Block (Eamon Farren), a Southerner whose two brothers, serving in the Confederate Army, were killed in the Civil War by Union soldiers armed with Winchester rifles. (The Spierigs also depict, briefly, other victims of Winchesters, including Native Americans and black people, one of whom is in chains—and these seemingly passive spirits are present only as silent sentinels of injustice.)
Benjamin’s rage results in a high pitch of surrealistic doings that the Spierigs depict with a sly simplicity, which only the blaringly conventional score (by Peter Spierig) belies; when they depict the startling and the astonishing, they want it to be seen clearly. In “Winchester,” the Spierigs have made a blunt and pissy American political film about the national curse of firearms and the unslaked, violent, destructive anger of the defeated Confederacy. It’s good that “Winchester” is rated PG-13; for all its metaphysical and mythological fantasy, it’s an educational film—a documentary refracted through the realm of the phantasmagoric.
