I loathe this recurring trend I'm seeing with a load of movies being put out, not just in the horror community. Studios take this engaging and expansive concept that could be fleshed out into a thought provoking and timeless archive of our culture, this Winchester story being the perfect capsule of life and death. There's plenty of interesting shit that's lightly tapped into... but like a ton of other projects of recent, we take this potentially enriching thing and throw it into the mainstream bubble. I can see the executives going, "Yes, this tale of a woman building time capsule rooms of dead people, and where they died, is cool and all... but it needs more poltergeists, jumpscares, and marketability." We're taking potential arthouse movies and slapping a studio coat of paint onto it. It's really disgusting.

In this movie, there are so many interesting conversations that are briefly explored. This woman is being told by supernatural beings (who were all killed by weapons from the company she owns), to build rooms in her mansion that capture their spirits and replicate the location where they died. That is so neat, and it amounts to barely anything. No big message at the end, no character study of this woman and the visiting doctor, who's also troubled just as much as her... really nothing. There's a lot of short scenes that go nowhere and inconsistent rules within the house. It's a generic ghost movie with a promising concept being used as the gimmick to draw suckers in like me. The synopsis is far more interesting than how it's executed.

I give credit for teed-bits of the production design, but we just had Crimson Peak and other great period piece movies, so I don't know what's the point of giving this credit for that. And for heaven's lord, I'm an apologist of egregious jump-scares, but this movie is not helping my case. I can't count how many times I wanted to walk about because of the predictable and ineffective jumps. Let's lock this movie up behind thirteen nails and forget it.