Courtesy of Universal Pictures
The Turning (2020)
One of the pleasures of Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw is its ambiguity. Who or what is the spectral couple seen skulking around the grounds of the estate? What do they want with the children? Could the governess who sees them be mad?
As adapted into a horror genre film, The Turning preserves some of that uncertainty while transposing the story in time and place from Victorian England to ’90s America. Kurt Cobain’s death is in the news as Kate (Mackenzie Davis) accepts a job offer as live-in tutor on a remote estate. Her pupil, 7-year-old Flora (Brooklynn Prince), is a delight, if sometimes slightly skittish—a precocious child full of knowledge and mischief. The dynamic shifts after the unexpected arrival of Flora’s adolescent brother, Miles (Finn Wolfhard), just expelled from boarding school.
With a sinister streak he barely bothers to conceal, Miles is a subtle torment to Kate, threatening, even sexually aggressive. The housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (Barbara Marten), is brusque, unfriendly and unhelpful. And then there are those shadows that flit across the hallways at night…
Canadian director Floria Sigismondi, best known for moody Expressionist photography and music videos, brings an acute and exquisite visual style to The Turning. She composes from patterns and textures. A serpentine country road (seen from above) crawls into the estate, an endless property shrouded in the bare-naked trees of late autumn. Life has ebbed away from this latter-day House of Usher. Crows caw and circle for their prey. The desolation is crossed by a chilly wind that makes the manor creak at night. The children’s parents are dead, their previous tutor went missing and the groundskeeper, a dubious man called Quint, also died recently (but his spirit lingers?).
The accumulated lore of gothic cinema is as influential on The Turning as Henry James’ vaguely disquieting story. The manor is a labyrinth of passages and—as in The Shining—an outdoor labyrinth of high hedges awaits the unwary. The house is dark, dusty and disused, crammed with the bric-a-brac of centuries and nations, like San Simeon gone to seed. Flora warns Kate against entering the manor’s closed east wing. Recalling Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca, Mrs. Grose is the lifelong servant with curdled attitude who knows more than she’s saying about strange doings in the house. Fog drapes the setting at night like a thin white sheet and frightful faces appear in dark windows and mirrors.
The acting is pitch perfect in lead and supporting roles. Price is a charmer as Flora, Wolfhard is sullen and devious as her brother and Davis gets down the nuances of her generation of young women—until overcome by fatigue and fear as nightmares blur into reality. She gives an excellent performance—directed from a female perspective—of a woman stalked by sexual predators, whether of flesh and blood or ectoplasm.
Carey and Chad Hayes’ screenplay conveys James’ ambiguity in a contemporary key. Is Kate beset by the evil dead or a boy who surrenders himself to darkness? And then, because her mother is confined to an institution, the thought is present throughout: Is Kate succumbing to madness or just a bad and understandable case of anxiety?
