Constructed in an incessant twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week mania for decades, it stands seven stories tall and contains hundreds of rooms. To the outsider it looks like a monstrous monument to a disturbed woman's madness.
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.
What is Helen Mirren doing in what is essentially a B-movie? I can't say but she brings great dignity to lines that are, at times, literally unspeakable.
It shouldn't happen to anyone, much less a Dame - not a movie of such barreling awfulness that it strands the great Helen Mirren in a gothic house of cards that collapses on actors and audiences alike.
You watch "Winchester" thinking about the movie that might have been, and wishing that those ghosts would transport Mirren into that movie, immediately.
