So there’s a new horror movie out this past weekend called The Turning. It’s another film version of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw which has been adapted a number of times, most notably 1961’s The Innocents. I checked The Turning out over the weekend, hoping it’d be at least a decent sit and not a predictably bad early year horror flick. Half the movie is surprisingly good… the other half is god-awful.
So The Turning is updated fom the late 1800 and is now set in 1994 (Kurt Cobain has just died… a fact the movie presents to us for unclear reasons). It stars Mackenzie Davis as a teacher who takes a job as a tutor for a little girl who lives in an isolated mansion (her parents recently died). Once at the house, things start to get creepy… first the people and then the hauntin’.
Whenever this movie is about the human characters, it’s kind of great. Mackenzie Davis does a very good job of showing her character descend into possible madness. The little girl is played by Brooklyn Prince (so good in The Florida Project) and she’s cute and adorable… but also sometimes a little disturbing. Finn Wolfhard (from Stranger Things and It) is once again in a horror story… and his character is deeply, aggressively disturbing. You get a real menace from him which is unusual since the actor usually plays good guys and hardly looks threatening. There’s an old lady live-in chef who is also great… she knows more than she lets on and is strangely protective of the children (who she calls thoroughbreds and defends them on their innate privilege).
Every time these humans interact, there’s a sense of foreboding and danger… but when more traditional haunted house supernatural stuff occurs, the movie is terrible. I mean, the jump scares are not remotely scary, the suspense fails to suspend, and often the scares are so poorly edited, I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to be scared about. It’s truly a marvel of ineptitude. It sinks the movie, regardless of how good the cast is when they are interacting. I’ve never been quite so confounded at how a movie can self-sabotage, going from something surprisingly good to shockingly bad.
And that ending. This movie doesn’t end, it stops. In fact, it has a perplexing and unnecessary false ending that isn’t great but it makes sense. And then the movie snaps back in time and we get the “real” ending. Which… which… erm… well, the movie just stops. I’m not sure what exactly happens though I have come up with three possibilities… and…. well… someone on YouTube theorized the whole movie was in the head of Courtney Love. A kind of drug-riddled guilt trip over killing Kurt Cobain. It’s not what happens, surely… but it makes as much sense as the more likely theories.
So… yeah… I doubt you even knew this movie came out and I assure you that you don’t want to see it. Not unless you love adaptations of the Turn of the Screw (for some reason) and/or are a huge Finn Wolfhard fan (since he’s the best part of the movie). It’s such a wasted opportunity… if they had just re-edited the movie and cut out the supernatural that the director couldn’t direct, this would have been a very good film.
Score: 65