HALLE Berry sure is making unusual choices for an Oscar winner.

Instead of taking the Nicole Kidman path on to greater and greater glory through a mix of arty quality and blockbusting crowd-pleasers, she has instead gone for the random shot-in-the-dark approach, the latest of which is Gothika.

Berry plays psychologist Miranda Grey, and we know she's a serious educated-type person because she wears black polo necks and uses vocabulary like "meanderings", all the while sporting a frown and expression of deep concern.

I'm surprised she doesn't have glasses to perch on the end of her nose purposefully. Working hard at the haunted mansion-esque Woodward Penitentiary, her husband is the boss, but that doesn't stop her fellow "psych", Robert Downey Junior, fixing her with a glad eye.

When we first meet her, she's dealing with problem patient Chloe (Penelope Cruz), who claims she is being raped nightly by the devil. Miranda remains unconvinced. But then one dark and stormy (obviously) night, she is forced to take a different road home from work, ending up nearly running over a distraught female who is standing in the middle of a road in a rather revealing nightie.

Swerving to avoid the girl and in the process smashing her car into a tree, she wakes up with no recollection of events after the crash, to find she is an inmate alongside Chloe in the same penitentiary where she once worked, accused of the murder of her husband.

Gothika is pure textbook from the word go, a film which has simply dragged every even-slightly-scary movie clich out into the open and then just lined them up and let them go.

There's thunder, dark, creaky gates, flickering lights, long corridors, the sound of a heartbeat and even a Perspex cell - an idea stolen from production designer Kristi Zea's work on Silence of the Lambs.

When Miranda studies from a huge textbook in her office she, of course, uses a small spotlight to pour over the text instead of doing the sensible thing and turning "the big light" on. As you do.

And the plot - where to begin? Plausibility takes an early dive in this picture - as if Miranda would have been placed in the same centre where she had worked as a doctor, alongside patients of whom she had intimate knowledge.

It's also a little too similar to What Lies Beneath in many respects, but is more obvious and ludicrous than even that, hardly understated, piece.

But, surprisingly, in some senses Gothika does work as a cinematic experience, and Berry gives an impassioned physical and emotional performance.

There are enough "gasp" moments, which are so well disguised even the most hardy of fright-fans won't see them coming, and a few twists in which you can't resist getting involved.

But what the heck does the title mean?