In "Gothika," Halle Berry plays a penitentiary criminal psychologist who awakens one morning to find herself incarcerated in her own psychiatric ward with no memory of having viciously murdered her husband. In pitch-speak, the slick supernatural thriller can be succinctly boiled down to "Girl, Interrupted" meets "The Ring," and, for a while there, Mathieu Kassovitz's atmospherically charged direction sucks the viewer into the story's hellish vortex. Thanks to Berry's best efforts and an effectively restrained turn by Robert Downey Jr. as her tentatively sympathetic co-worker, this effort from Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis' genre label, Dark Castle Entertainment, will probably attract some solid boxoffice but nothing crazy.

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