Winchester

The Winchester House, and the woman behind its eternal construction, could be the foundation of a fascinating movie. A woman is so racked with guilt over how her family became rich -- making instruments of death -- that she feels cursed, and the curse is to spend all the money turning her house into a near-innavigable maze of dead ends, stairways to nowhere and doors that open to nothing. Winchester looks at that, says "nah", and trades it all for bog standard jump scares and a haunted house story, complete with a troubled protagonist with an unknown past connected to the house cliche, and a someone you think is alive is a ghost cliche thrown in. The premise of the movie is supposed to be a doctor's psychoanalysis of the widow Winchester, but it is merely framework for the spookums and ghost-house happenings. There is no exploration of Winchester's mania. No attempt to get an understanding out of the madness. Just a routine haunted house story that didn't need the Winchester House name to happen. Just a waste of a movie all around.