Winchester (2018)

Winchester arrives dressed as a haunted-house picture and spends nearly all of its runtime being exactly that. Helen Mirren plays Sarah Winchester, the real heiress who poured her fortune into an endless San Jose mansion, convinced that the souls killed by her family's rifles demand appeasement. There is a conscience buried in the foundation, a quiet discomfort with profiting from instruments of death. The film handles this as a personal haunting, though, a matter of ghosts and guilt, never a systemic accounting. The house is the villain and the ledger both, and the camera prefers creaking floorboards to argument.

A softer thread runs alongside. Sarah fights a male board and a hired doctor who would declare her unfit and seize her company, which lends the proceedings a modest feminist current. The film never foregrounds it. It simply lets an older woman hold the screen and win. Elsewhere the record is thin. The cast is white and stays white. A Confederate soldier haunts the halls, but his grievance is vengeance, not the war's cause. The doctor's drug dependence and the misdiagnosis of a woman who sees the dead give the script a passing interest in mental health, more mechanism than message.

What remains is a spook show with a faint moral aftertaste. The film gestures at the cost of gun violence, then retreats into trapdoors and thirteen nails. It is competently gloomy, occasionally handsome, and never quite willing to preach. Critics were unkind. Audiences shrugged. The mansion, at least, endures.