Gothika (R)
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This came out in 2003, but I didn't see it until 2016. It's something I always wanted to see, in spite of the fact that it was not well received by critics. And now that I have seen it, I can say I really think it's unfair for it to have been panned. It's not a great movie, but I certainly don't think it's bad.

So, it begins with a psychiatrist named Dr. Miranda Grey (Halle Berry) having a session with an inmate named Chloe (Penélope Cruz) at the psychiatric penitentiary where Dr. Grey works. Chloe had killed her stepfather, who had raped her. Now she believes the devil is raping her, in the prison. Of course, Miranda doesn't believe in supernatural things like the devil, so she thinks Chloe is delusional. After that session, she meets with her boss, Dr. Douglas Grey (Charles S. Dutton), who also happens to be her husband. Then he goes home, and Miranda plans to go home later, to meet him for dinner. We also meet another doctor at the prison, Pete Graham (Robert Downey, Jr.), who seems to have a more than strictly professional interest in Miranda. Anyway, when Miranda is driving home, there's a rainstorm. (I thought it was kind of a nice touch, that looking through her windshield in the rain was a lot like... an earlier scene that involved water on a mirror.) But before she can get home, she has to take a detour over a bridge. And she ends up swerving to avoid hitting a girl she sees standing in the road. She then gets out of the car to see if the girl is okay, and... things get weird.

Miranda wakes up as a prisoner in the penitentiary. (Before I watched the movie, I didn't know much about it, so I thought maybe it would turn out that she had just been delusional about thinking she was a doctor, or that there would be some question about that. But I was wrong.) Pete is now treating her, and he informs her that she had killed her husband. She doesn't remember this, and is understandably terribly distraught by the news, on a couple of levels. She's sure she didn't do it, and she's sure she's not crazy. And yet, she begins seeing things. Mainly, the girl she'd previously seen on the road. Whom she eventually learns had died a few years ago, an apparent suicide. Being a rational person, she doesn't want to believe in ghosts, but it soon becomes impossible not to. And as her memories of the night of her husband's murder begin to return, she realizes she'd been possessed by this ghost. But of course, no one else will believe her.

Anyway... I guess that's pretty much all I want to say about the plot. But there's a reason the ghost wanted to kill Doug, and when it was revealed, it didn't surprise me at all. And there's other stuff going on, which also wasn't really surprising. (And I did get the impression that we were supposed to suspect one character of being a villain, which was so obvious that I seriously doubted he would turn out to be.) Still, in spite of the movie's predictability, I thought it was decent. It had some reasonably scary bits, some of which involved the ghost, as well as the (non-super)natural fear of having everyone believe you're insane when you're actually not. So... yeah, not a bad movie.