Gothika

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Gothika

Directed by	Mathieu Kassovitz
Produced by	Dark Castle Entertainment
Written by	Sebastian Gutierrez
Starring	Halle Berry
Music by	John Ottman Lior Rosner
Distributed by	- USA - Warner Bros. - non-USA - Columbia Pictures
Release date(s)	November 21, 2003
Running time	98 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

Gothika is a 2003 horror movie starring Halle Berry and Penélope Cruz. It was directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. The film's tagline was "Just because someone is dead doesn't mean they are gone."

1 Brief Synopsis
2 Detailed Synopsis
3 Cast
4 External links

[edit] Brief Synopsis

Dr. Miranda Grey (Halle Berry) is a prominent psychiatrist working at a mental hospital. On her way home from work one day, she narrowly misses hitting a girl in the middle of the road. The next thing Miranda knows, several days have passed, she is a patient in the very hospital she once worked for, and stands accused of murdering her husband. Miranda fights to convince her former co-workers of her sanity and her innocence while she struggles to regain her lost memories.

[edit] Detailed Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Gothika is the story of a psychiatrist, Dr. Miranda Grey, who works at a mental hospital and has a car accident after trying to avoid a girl on a road during a stormy night, while driving back home. She rushes to try to help the girl, who turns out to be a ghost. The girl, in turn, gets possession of Miranda's body by burning her after she extended her hand to the girl.

Miranda next wakes up in the very hospital she works for, but as a patient. Drugged and confused, she remembers nothing of what happened after the car accident. To her horror, she learns that her husband was brutally murdered and that she is the primary suspect.

While she tries to get by in the hospital, the ghost uses Miranda's body to carry out messages (most noticeably, she carves the words "not alone" into Miranda's arm) which leads the other doctors to believe Miranda is suicidal and is inflicting the wounds on herself.

Meanwhile, Miranda bonds with one of her former patients (who is now her fellow inmate), Chloe (Penélope Cruz). Several times in sessions, Chloe had claimed that she'd been raped while in the hospital, but Miranda had always attributed these stories to mental illness. She realizes that Chloe is not crazy and was not making the stories up, and the two embrace, with Chloe warning Miranda that her attacker was going to target Miranda next.

Miranda begins regaining some of her memories bit by bit, and slowly comes to remember herself killing her husband. She discovers that the ghost had used her body to murder Miranda's husband- so all of the evidence points to her.

Eventually, Miranda escapes the hospital, having recognized the girl as a ghost- she has also discovered that the girl, as well as one of Miranda's former patients and many other teenaged girls, had been raped and murdered by her husband (she actually finds a video of her husband raping and torturing one of the girls) and the local sheriff (John Carroll Lynch), who was still alive.

Miranda returns to the hospital in order to tell her old friend Pete (Robert Downey Jr.) and to save Chloe from the sheriff. Miranda is then attacked by the local sheriff, who tries to kill her. However, Miranda kills the sheriff in an act of self defense, with the help of the ghost.

After proving their innocence and sanity, Miranda and her patient are released from the asylum a few months later. Miranda claims to be free of the ghost's influence, but finds that she still sees ghosts, one as a young boy standing in the middle of the road.