Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.  
Anyone old enough to remember the TV series CIRCLE OF FEAR or NIGHT GALLERY? They were mid-70s show in the vein of Rod Serling's TWILIGHT ZONE but the little episodes were very predictable and formula. Usually, someone was murdered and, usually, their ghost came back for revenge in a number of bizarre fashions.  
 
GOTHIKA is a throw-back to those old TV shows - a supernatural revenge story with state of the art special effects and some chilling cinematography that makes the movie look a lot classier than it deserves to be. Halle Berry, gorgeous and with a surprisingly good screaming voice, threatens to pull a Cuba Gooding Jr. with her post-Oscar career in this tepidly written horror movie with the inexplicable title.  
 
Berry plays Dr. Miranda Grey, a prison psychologist specializing in dealing with the criminally insane. Her primary patient, Chloe, played by the overrated Penelope Cruz, is a lisping example of over-acting. When Cruz screams some obscenities for effect and then tries to touch her doctor, she comes off as someone who's watched Isabella Rossellini in BLUE VELVET too many times. And she ain't no Rossellini.  
 
Intentionally or not, the beginning of GOTHIKA has Berry misequating professional distance and aloofness. While Cruz goes into yowling hysterics, Berry calmly walks down the prison hallway, heading for her daily swim(!!) Miscasting abounds when Berry meets up with her creepy husband played by Charles Dutton and her creepy co-worker, the stalker-doctor played by Robert Downey Jr.  
 
Dr. Grey soon finds herself on the other side of the cell bars, accused of her husband's murder. Is she losing her sanity? Is she guilty? Are there ghosts at work?  
 
The audience laughed when Downey described a patient's drug profile. Berry, obviously no student of ER, rattles off medical dialogue with all the conviction of reading her phone bill. She also doesn't seem to mind some blatant exploitation - there's a shower scene that seems to be there solely for some gratuitous nudity.  
 
But GOTHIKA's problems are multifold. Blame the director for not giving his all-star cast some instinctive direction. Blame the actors for not being interested in their characters. And blame the writer for a script that needed a rewrite or four. This is one of those whodunit horror movies that telegraphs its villains and victims well in advance. The true horror of GOTHIKA is that Halle Berry's choice of material is so hit and miss.  
 
