November 21, 2003  |  By assuming the lead role in the absurdly muddled Gothika, Halle Berry may have done more to prove the existence of an “Oscar curse” than any actress since Louise Fletcher (remember her?) segued from Milos Forman's acclaimed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to John Boorman's notorious Exorcist II: The Heretic .

Not unlike Boorman's folly, Gothika is a brazenly illogical and inadvertently comical horror show, the kind of anything-goes mishmash that prompts you to suspect that key transitional scenes were left on the cutting-room floor. Indeed, the continuity here is so ragged, and the plot twists so arbitrary, you might wonder whether the projectionist accidentally spliced together reels from two or three different movies.

Directed with visual flair and narrative fumbling by French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz ( La Haine, The Crimson Rivers ), this sputtering misfire revolves around Miranda Grey (Berry), a stern-faced psychiatrist employed at Woodward Penitentiary, which apparently is a dumping ground for the criminally insane. At first, Dr. Grey's most challenging patient is a deeply troubled young woman (Penelope Cruz in a really tatty wig) who raves about being raped by Satan. Not too long into the movie, however, the psychiatrist gets a dose of her own medicine, so to speak, when she's arrested and incarcerated for a horrific crime -- the brutal murder of her husband, Woodward warden Douglas Grey (Charles S. Dutton) – she has no memory of committing.

Screenwriter Sebastian Gutierrez has cobbled together a plot that has something to do with the vengeful spirit of a murdered teen-age girl who sporadically bursts into flames, and something else to do a sex-and-sadism conspiracy that plays like a rerun of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit . Robert Downey Jr. and Bernard Hill appear as Woodward co-workers, but they're so obviously intended as red herrings that it's impossible to take them seriously as likely suspects. Meanwhile, the real culprit walks around and more or less bellows: “I'm the mad killer! I'm the mad killer!” Eventually, other characters take notice.

Judging from the final scene – which, heaven help us, indicates the possibility of a sequel – Gothika is set in some parallel universe where demonic possession is an acceptably credible defense for anyone charged with manslaughter. It's also a place where security is, at best, a sometime thing at prisons for the criminally insane, and purportedly intelligent heroines continue to drive getaway cars long after it's obvious that the brakes are out of whack.

Berry struggles to retain some shards of dignity as she dutifully plods through the contrivances of Gothika. But she's hard-pressed to generate interest while the audience is distracted by glaring inconsistencies of tone, character development and, no kidding, architectural design. Some Woodward cells are ultra-modern glass-and-steel enclosures; others are dank hellholes with peeling paint and flickering fluorescent bulbs. Hey, whatever works.

No cheap trick or visual cliché is beneath the perpetrators of Gothika . To indicate an air of free-floating spookiness throughout the haunted halls of Woodward Penitentiary, they simply use 30-watt bulbs where most reasonable folks would normally place 100-watt illumination. Insert joke about dim bulbs here.