Pop goes the lemur.
While getting suspense to work on screen can be difficult, the idea behind it is actually pretty simple. It's the same principle behind the jack-in-the-box. You want to give the audience time to realize something's about to happen; the tinny, atonal version of a kid's song needs time to strike a nerve. Next, you need the lid to come off before the tune's over so that what's been expected is still somehow a surprise. Finally, you should reload the box before the jeering face loses all of its creepiness.

There are four or five moments in Gothika, the new Halle Berry thriller, which could have delivered a memorable SPROING if properly managed. But instead of putting in the effort to set up four or five bone-deep chills, the script trots out a dozen teensy breezes that coax nary a goose pimple. Gothika is like an Alvin and the Chipmunks version of a more successful thriller; it's played at the wrong speed, and doesn't quite know when enough is enough.

It was a dark and stormy movie.
Our heroine, Berry's Miranda Grey, is a successful psychiatrist at an institution for the criminally insane. Driving home from work on the requisite dark and stormy night, she swerves to avoid a girl standing in the middle of the road and ends up in a ditch. The girl doesn't move, and when Grey goes out to check on her, she realizes something ain't quite right, aside from the fact that there's a girl standing in the middle of the road in a rainstorm. Her would-be victim has some ugly wounds just below her pallid collarbone, and when Miranda SPROING the screen goes black. Miranda wakes up incarcerated in the asylum that employs her, charged with taking an ax to her loving husband.

So it's up to Miranda to prove that she's not crazy, as well as to find out what really happened to her husband. Not necessarily a bad premise, but the script oversimplifies any tension it might generate. Miranda knows she's not crazy. She's a psychiatrist. Robert Downey Jr., as the former co-worker assigned to her case in spite of the fact that he nurses an unrequited crush on her, knows she is crazy. Their disagreement has all the enthusiasm of a set of assembly instructions for an E-Z Bake Oven, and the myriad inexplicable occurrences every three minutes come up in the conversation less than you might think. If my patient's arm started spontaneously bleeding portentous messages, I might not be so convinced that she was the one who needed more medication.

Fortunately, where psychiatry fails, the convenient plot device succeeds. Penelope Cruz plays Chloe, a patient of Miranda's who SPROING seems to know more about SPROING than she SPROING and SPROINGITY SPROING SPROING SPROING. Chloe is about equal parts Angelina Jolie in Girl Interrupted, Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, and (have mercy on us all) Robert DeNiro in Angel Heart. For good measure, she tops it off with a hairdo that looks like Uma Thurman's wig from Pulp Fiction.

Elementary, my dear Miranda.
Eventually Miranda figures out what really happened. Not only that, she figures out what she didn't figure out about what really happened the first time she figured it out. Which leads to the only really laughable moment in the film, the Big Confrontation.

BAD GUY: I am the villain here, you know.
MIRANDA: I know you are, but what am I?
BAD GUY: Well, it takes one to… wait a minute, that didn't make any sense. If you know I'm the villain, shouldn't you either be stopping me or running like hell?
MIRANDA: You would think so, but no.
BAD GUY: Hey, that furry guy in the audience is trying to glue his eyes shut with partially chewed Milk Duds.
MIRANDA: Like that'll help. He'll still have to hear the rest of this implausible exchange. So, you up for the obligatory chase sequence?

Brilliant? Not really.
Most of Gothika isn't this bad. Nevertheless you do wonder why it takes a brilliant psychiatrist twice as long as anybody else in the theater to get a clue. I'm usually terrible at guessing endings ("Wow, I couldn't believe it when Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan got together at the end!"), but even I saw the last twenty minutes coming from a mile off.

Sometimes a movie like this can survive being predictable if the performances are top-notch, or it's stylistically vivid. While the performances in Gothika are decent, they're not top-notch. And while it's fitfully stylish, it also deploys flickering light with the irritating regularity of a bug zapper. There's a good idea for a movie in here somewhere, but mostly Gothika bobs at the end of a spring that's already uncoiled.