Repeating forms

‘Winchester’ is a nudging morality play

“Winchester” is the latest from Aussie-horror nerds The Spierig Brothers. The film mines the true story of Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Winchester, owner of Winchester Repeating Arms (originally Volcanic Repeating Arms), which helped win the Civil War and strap every open-carry guy out there with their very own bolt-action hog leg.

In 1906, we meet Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke, “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”), an opiate-addled psychiatrist from San Francisco who is hired by the Winchester company to evaluate the mental state of its majority shareholder, the widowed Sarah (Helen Mirren). Upon inheriting the modern equivalent of half-a-billion dollars, Sarah spends her time in San Jose overseeing the ongoing construction of the “house that spirits built”—where the souls of those killed by her namesake product could come to grips with their sudden and violent exit stage left.

When Price arrives he finds 24-hour-a-day construction of the house, which is worthy of Escher. Staircases lead to ceilings. Doors open over a four-story drop. Rooflines meet like an ADD Etch-a-Sketch. It was (and still is) massive. The rooms, sometimes sealed by timbers with 13 nails, were built to mimic the locations where the deceased met their fate. When the ghost in question found peace, workers would destroy the room and build a new one. Often the phantoms were fairly benign. Until one baleful spirit decides to take revenge.

The Spierigs are long-time favorites of mine. They’re like the Lord and Miller (“21 Jump Street”) of taking tired, horror genretypes and reinvesting them with vital imagination. 2009’s “Daybreakers” is a great example. Vampires, sure—but it’s loaded with non-sparkly surprises. Their early zombie-indie, 2003’s “Undead,” similarly turned expectations on their ear. “Winchester” doesn’t really say anything overt about the current state of affairs concerning gun violence, though its formality made me wish they were directing a “Tales From the Hood” entry that applied this concept to unarmed black dudes who’ve been shot by the police. That would be their kind of crazy.

Instead, “Winchester” is more dramatic than horrific, though its thoughtfulness and creativity on both counts is pure Spierig. There are only so many jump scares and creepy angles to be had in this realm. Here we have a well-made, well-acted ghost story, the reward of which lies in the script from the Spierigs and co-writer Tom Vaughn. The twists and turns are compelling enough alone and are made even more so with Mirren and Clarke’s engaging, invested performances.

Then again, I could also watch Mirren smoke cigarettes and read gun control legislation for two hours.