There really was a woman named Sarah Winchester who built a bizarre folly of a mansion in San Jose at the turn of the last century. One can imagine she was not unlike the fictional Sarah as played by Helen Mirren in Winchester. The widowed heir of the founder of the Winchester rifle company, Mirren plays Sarah as imperious but not arrogant, clear-eyed and clear-minded despite accusations of madness.
At least in this “Inspired by Actual Events” fiction, Sarah is haunted not only by guilt over wealth derived from death but by the real ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles. Their spirits guide her in the construction of her house; she tries to recreate the rooms where they died to serve as antechambers before their peaceful departure into the afterlife. But there is one restless spirit that refuses to be placated.
Parts of the film were shot on location in the mansion that is as much the star of Winchester as Mirren or Jason Clarke, playing the alienist dispatched by the Winchester company’s directors in a bid to have Sarah declared mentally incompetent to control her stock. The mansion is an elaborate Victorian edifice of dark carved wood—a house built to creak, especially when the night wind blows and the cold drafts extinguish the feeble light of candles. Little wonder specters can be glimpsed on stairways that dead-end at the ceiling or by doors that open to nothing.
The alienist disbelieves anything he can’t touch or study but acknowledges that the imagination can produce false perceptions that have nothing to do with reality. When he begins seeing things in that house that cannot be, he wonders whether it’s the effect of the laudanum, the morphine solution that deadens the pain over the loss of his wife. But the glassy-eyed mania of Sarah’s young nephew, speaking in someone else’s voice while in a trance, is closer to demonic possession than opium delusion.
Like most contemporary horror movies, Winchester relies on a series of jolting moments sustained by suspenseful music. However, Australian directors Michael and Peter Spierig (Undead) go a step beyond with unsettling visual compositions that magnify the odd configurations of a house where the uncanny can find a home.
