The Turning ★

Disappointing horror flick Dir: Floria Sigismondi 1hr 34mins (15)

This updated version of The Turn of the

Screw takes the psychological ambiguity of Henry James’s novella and whittles it down into a flat and fairly basic horror flick, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Set in the 1990s, the action takes places in a sprawling manor house where a young teacher (Mackenzie Davis) has arrived to take up a job as a governess to orphaned eight-year-old Flora (Brooklynn Prince), whose last nanny has done a runner. Then her older brother Miles (Finn Wolfhard) unexpectedly turns up. The children are the film’s “main asset”: Flora flits between “mercurial mischief and malice”, and Miles exudes “the charm and careless cruelty of extreme privilege”. But alas for Davis, there is very little in the screenplay for her to cling to.

There’s a “wonderful simplicity” to James’s story, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent, but the film is muddled. Floria Sigismondi’s “video game visuals” sit oddly with the Gothic source material, and it doesn’t help that the film has been “saddled with the conventional scares” of a cheap and cheerful horror movie. It’s hard to build a “sense of creeping dread” when ghosts keep popping up “like a bunch of broken fairground animatronics”. Shadowy figures appearing in mirrors; a mannequin that moves on its own; it’s-only-a-dream moments... The Turning has them all, said Ben Kenigsberg in The New York Times. It’s a shame to see a skilled actress like Davis reduced to “miming ashen poses” in this unoriginal, scare-free film.