Universal Pictures
2020
PG-13
“I know what you’re afraid of. Keeping the lights on won’t keep you safe.”The Turning stars Finn Wolfhard (TV’s Stranger Things) and Mackenzie Davis (TV’s Black Mirror) in a thrilling adaptation of Henry James’ landmark novel. At a mysterious estate in the Maine countryside, a newly appointed nanny is charged with the care of two disturbed orphans. She quickly discovers that both the children and the house are harboring dark secrets and things may not e as they appear.
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. I mean, with everything that has been going on compounding in this year 2020–the Beer Virus, job woes, the foot still healing up from the major surgery last year, my father having a heart attack, among other things–I just stopped writing for the good part of the last handful of months. I didn’t know when I would get back to doing so, and frankly didn’t care much. It was a lethargy that I hadn’t experienced since the 90s. Sure, I was still doing the podcasts, but even that wasn’t keeping up with all the movies I was taking in during this period. There needed to be something that would figuratively kick me in the butt, an impetus that would rekindle my passion to write down my unbridled thoughts on a movie. As it turns out, 2020’s The Turning was just the movie to do so.
The pun was unintentional, but pretty apt, I’d say.
The Turning is yet another adaptation of the classic Gothic novel The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. There have been others, but The Turning is the shiny new one, and that’s why everyone should care about it. Wait, no, sorry. My sarcasm seems to be seeping into this review a bit earlier than expected. Let’s see if I can get a handle on that. Now then, as I just mentioned, this is something of a new adaptation of the novel, and if you passed up the DVD back cover blurb I included up there, the movie concerns a nanny named Kate (Mackenzie Davis, doing her best bewildered Zooey Deschanel impression), who is put in charge of a couple of orphaned rich brats: there’s Flora (played by Brooklynn Prince), a rather bright and imaginative little girl with that prerequisite creepiness; and the older sibling Miles (Finn Wolfhard!), the very definition of enfant terrible, with a serious sociopath streak that only the rich tend to develop in these kind of movies. They’re both the wards of their long-time governess Mrs. Grose (Barbara Marten), one of those ultra-strict, underwear a bit too starched Victorian types, and not the fun kind.
I should point out that, not only is The Turning an adaptation of The Turning of the Screw, but it’s also a period piece, as it’s established early on that the year is 1994, by way of a television showing the news broadcast of Kurt Cobain’s body found of an apparent suicide. They never actually use music from that time period, mind you; they utilize songs from modern indie bands that approximate the sound of alternative music from 1994 for the soundtrack. Which…is not a gripe. Really, the music used here does well to set the dark mood the movie is going for. And really, “Getting 1994 Right” is not the priority.
What the movie does right is setting a strong Gothic atmosphere, with the settings and especially the mansion interiors. For the first half hour or so, this is what hooked me in. The movie seemed to be doing a good job at building the tension, leading up to…something. It soon became apparent, though, that this was all the movie was going to be: All build-up, no payoff. It was like, instead of adapting the novel, the writers adapted the Wikipedia synopsis. What made The Turn of the Screw a classic that has endured for over a century was the way it was a ghost story that wasn’t a ghost story: it deftly made the reader question whether the haunting was real, or the result of the protagonist’s decent into madness due to mental illness. Here, while it’s established early on that Kate’s mum is institutionalized (all she wanted was a Pepsi), lending the seed that Kate may be not all there in the head, the movie plays it more as a straight haunted house flick…until about ten minutes to the end of the movie, when one of the biggest insults to our collective intelligence happens, causing me to shout, “WAS THAT IT?!?” at my television when the end credits started rolling. I get the feeling that a lot of the movie that may have helped round things out was left on the cutting room floor. And no, I’m not going to buy the DVD to see if there are deleted scenes that do that.
Overall: While I was stoked for a new adaptation of a classic 19th Century Gothic psychological ghost story, The Turning just turned out to be a bunch of nothing. It’s not even a bad movie, just…nothing. A true waste of ninety minutes, with the only emotional response being disgust, like discovering the creme filling in an Oreo cookie was replaced with Miracle Whip. Pass.
