Exposure therapy is a method of treatment targeted toward anxiety disorders. It works by exposing the patient to the source of their anxiety in a non-threatening environment in order to desensitize them to it. This is exactly what has happened to ghost movies over the past few decades. There are tropes that define nearly every entry in the genre and cause them to all be nearly identical save for a different mentally perturbed damsel in distress. Some of these tropes include, but are not limited to; prolonged silences filled with swelling string music as the protagonist wanders through a dark room, footprints appearing on the floor without any corporeal form attached to them, children talking to ghosts, children drawing disturbing pictures of themselves and said ghosts, and certain areas of creepy old houses being off limits to the protagonist. The Turning falls victim to all of these tropes and then some.
This film follows Kate, a young teacher that is called to be a live-in tutor for a pair of wealthy orphaned siblings after their prior nanny departs suddenly. She initially expects to be teaching the younger of the two, a girl named Flora. However, her older brother Miles returns from boarding school suddenly, bringing a slew of mysterious and unsettling events with him.
The Turning is based upon the 1898 novella ‘The Turn of the Screw’ by Henry James. What I have to emphasize is that this seems to be a loose, loose adaptation; the biggest departure being that this iteration is set in the 90’s instead of the 1890’s. This is a fact that the writers ensured to make blindingly obvious but does not seem to function in any way except to service the soundtrack. In many ways, I believe the film would have actually functioned better tonally if it had been a period piece.
The Turn of the Screw is an internationally renowned novella that has stood the test of time for over a century. I know this because it was the first text I read as an English major at UW. Part of the reason that it is so beloved is because it was revolutionary in the field of ghost stories. The Turning comes at a point in time where doing anything new with the ghost subset of the horror genre is practically a miracle. There would be moments that would cause me to physically roll my eyes and look at my friend who agreed to attend the screening with me as if to say, “Did they seriously think that they could get away with that?” But this isn’t entirely the fault of screenwriters Carey W. Hayes, Chad Hayes, Jade Bartlett and director Floria Sigismondi. Any adaptation of this story to be released post mid-2000s would be doomed to fail if it is true to the original material. This is because the novella is part of what created the canon of horror tropes that we are so constantly bombarded with and creating anything new about it would require straying from the primary text.
This lackluster writing also does a major disservice to its trio of stars. Mackenzie Davis, Brooklyn Prince, and Finn Wolfhard portray Kate, Flora, and Miles, respectively. It’s hard to say which of the three performances was more uncomfortable to watch. Each character had moments that were clearly meant to build tension but came across forced and even more unnatural than the supernatural events surrounding them. Going into this film, I was really only familiar with Wolfhard’s work in It and Stranger Things, both of which I believe he is phenomenal in. I did not have the highest of expectations for this adaptation, but I thought that Wolfhard’s performance would be able to save even a scrap of decency and respectability. This is the type of writing that is so poor that not even the most talented of actors could salvage it.
Overall, this is an unfortunately poor adaptation of an excellent novella and is definitely not the one that modern audiences deserve. Perhaps if this had come at a time where the market wasn’t overly saturated with ghost stories then it would have worked better. Maybe we wouldn’t have been able to see practically every twist from before the characters even approached its general vicinity. It’s the kind of movie that makes you realize why January has come to be called dump month – because in any other context this would have floundered.
.5/5 STARS