The Turning

Floria Sigismondi Showcases the Horrors of Being a Woman

IN ONE OF THE MOST TENDER SCENES IN NEW HORROR FILM THE TURNING, Mackenzie Davis’s character, Kate, teaches Brooklynn Prince’s Flora how to put on a “brave face.” The Turning, adapted from Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, is about an aspiring teacher who secures a job as a live-in tutor for Flora in a big, old house. Kate wants Flora to be brave, in the way she herself learned from her mother, so she teaches Flora how to put on her “brave face,” an invisible mask worn against the world. Sigismondi’s adaptation brings her own experience to it, adding a relevant texture that makes it more interesting. “I really wanted to make it female-centric,” Sigismondi says. “[Some] elements I took from the book and kind of dove in there and then made it our own.”

The “brave face” scene is important, because most other times, Kate is being terrorized by the ghost of deceased riding instructor Quint, or by the loud and rambunctious presence of Flora’s brother Miles (Finn Wolfhard), who has no respect for Kate, because he’s learned no other way to be toward women.

“Quint is that sort of passed-down abusive masculinity that is learned,” Sigismondi says. It’s generational abuse that Miles is in the process of taking on. “Miles [is] at that choice: what kind of man am I going to be?”

While Sigismondi’s film raises the question of whether and how toxicity can drive one to madness, it doesn’t provide a direct answer. Kate comes into the kids’ home psychologically loaded: “Even though she comes in very confident, fresh, there are little hints, you know, from her mother and her roommate,” Sigismondi says. “Are these her experiences she’s bringing to the table, or experiences [that] really happened in the house?

“The kids, they’re taunting her, do they drive her mad or is it the Pandora’s box within her that gets opened? I want to leave it up to interpretation.”