Whatever you do, don't stop for the roadside ghost

In Gothika, a clammy new thriller that opens nationwide today, Halle Berry plays Miranda Grey, a psychiatrist at a Connecticut institution for the criminally insane. One of her patients is Chloe (Penelope Cruz), a disheveled young woman who screeches and rants and claims that she is being sexually assaulted by the devil in her locked cell. One obvious symptom of Chloe's illness, whatever it is, is a tendency to speak in lurid similes: "He opened me up like a flower of pain," she says of her demonic attacker, and (about someone else), "I sliced his Adam's apple in half like a piece of fruit on a summer day."

In that spirit you might say that this movie, directed by Mathieu Kassovitz from a script by Sebastian Gutierrez, is like a plastic houseplant that has been given too much water, or a wax apple that someone has tried to bake in a pie. It is a thoroughly synthetic confection, compounded of cliches drawn from a half-dozen genres and subgenres that for a while might almost persuade its audience, as it apparently convinced its makers, that it is something more.

In the end, though, as the ghost-story cliches collide with the serial-killer cliches, and the women-behind-bars cliches give way to the wronged-women-seeking revenge cliches, the movie proves to be both too much and not enough: yet another slick, empty package of ersatz entertainment.

After her frustrating session with Chloe, Miranda saunters through the rest of her workday, oblivious to the sinister foreshadowings all around her. Gutierrez seems to have gotten some script advice from either Edward Bulwer-Lytton or Snoopy, since it is (perpetually) a dark and stormy night. The gloomy corridors of the Woodward correctional center are bathed in pale, bluish fluorescence, and the power is always on the verge of going out.

Kassovitz and Matthew Libatique, the cinematographer, do an effective (if not terribly original) job of creating an atmosphere of dread, though the director is a little too fond of making the audience jump at nothing. The false scares are so numerous -- an umbrella popping open, a light going out, a barn owl flapping into the frame -- that after a while they diminish the impact of the really scary stuff, rather than heightening it.

Still, for a while, Gothika will manage to quicken your pulse and keep you in a state of nervous anticipation. Driving home through torrential rain, Miranda sees a girl standing in the middle of the road. When Miranda tries to help her, the girl chatters and screams and then bursts into flame. The doctor awakens a few days later to find that she has become an inmate, having been locked up for murdering her husband (Charles Dutton) -- who was also the director of the hospital -- with an ax, a crime she initially has no memory of committing.

Her sort of kindly, sort of creepy therapist is Pete Graham (Robert Downey Jr.), a former

colleague who had a crush on her and who now either wants to help her or is part of a conspiracy to drive her completely out of her mind.

"Pete," Miranda insists, "I'm possessed." The flaming girl continues to pursue her in that passive-aggressive way common to movie ghosts in the post-Sixth Sense era, driven by an urgent need to communicate something and able to do so only by depositing maddeningly cryptic clues. The supernatural visitor writes the words "Not Alone" on fogged-up glass, in blood and, gruesomely, in the flesh of Miranda's arm. What she means is "I was the victim of a homicidal maniac, and I need you to help me uncover his horrible crimes," but she lacks either the space or the spelling ability to say so outright.