Henry James doesn’t deserve this
The Turning 15 cert, 94 min
★★★★★
Dir Floria Sigismondi Starring Mackenzie Davis, Finn Wolfhard, Brooklynn Prince, Barbara Marten, Joely Richardson
Why do filmmakers think we’re all so scared of gerunds? It’s probably Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick’s fault: in the wake of The Shining, along came The Haunting, The Howling, The Happening, The Wailing, The Awakening, The Vanishing (twice) and three separate Conjurings, each promising a dose of verbal-noun-delineated terrors.
Add The Turning to the list – though only for reference; you wouldn’t want to watch it. This redundant update of The Turn of the Screw riffs on the classic Henry James ghost story as many very fine films have done previously, from Jack Clayton’s The Innocents to Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others. But it makes the fatal error of using the eeriest facet of James’s tale – its ambiguity – as the rationale for an all-time-catastrophic third-act twist, which connects with the viewer less like a surprise than an outright insult.
The film opens promisingly, albeit perplexingly, in the US in the midnineties, where Kurt Cobain’s suicide is on the news and the national mood is grungily downbeat. Kate (Mackenzie Davis), a teacher, has made the decision to leave her job to become the live-in tutor to Flora (Brooklynn Prince), a 10-year-old orphan living in a crumbling country estate with her older brother Miles (Finn Wolfhard) and Mrs Grose (Barbara Marten), the family’s housekeeper, who regards this young, keen and pretty new arrival with vinegary suspicion.
The children are clearly troubled, having spent their childhoods in seclusion after their parents’ death in that old horror staple, an unexplained car accident. Flora has never left the estate since, while Miles was taken under the wing of Quint (Niall Greig Fulton), a no-good groundskeeper whose influence on the boy has been far from wholesome.
Director Floria Sigismondi initially whips up an effective atmosphere of dread. But when things go bump in the night, they just keep bumping: the plot doesn’t allow for an ebb and flow of tension, but instead serves up a steady parade of clunks and whoos and creepy dolls that quickly becomes tedious.
The crux of the trouble comes with Joely Richardson’s brief appearance as Kate’s mentally fractured mother, who gives the film its best hope of finding an intriguing new angle on James’s work – but it proves to be the banana skin it slips on. As twists go, it is so bizarre and badly done that I’m still not sure I get what it’s meant to achieve. What it does achieve, though, is an instant cinematic belly flop on to the bricks, to be looked back on and winced at for months.