“Nothing should have to suffer.” From their lips to god’s ears!
Main Cast: Mackenzie Davis, Finn Wolfhard
Director: Floria Sigismondi
My daughter and I hit a rough patch with the theater in 2018 with THE POSSESSION OF HANNAH GRACE and THE NUN, dozing off during both. I’ve still not seen HANNAH GRACE again and while I have watched THE NUN again, I fell asleep that time, too. But neither of these compare to our terrible experience with THE TURNING in 2020.
This was not only a terrible movie, it was the second book to screen adaptation starring Finn Wolfhard that we saw in a theater where a duo of middle school girls were right behind us and wouldn’t shut up through the entire movie, big Finn Wolfhard fans both of them.
Now I could tolerate it, barely, through IT Chapter 2 because it’s a Stephen King movie. But at THE TURNING, based on the Henry James novel THE TURN OF THE SCREW, these two kids were on top of an already bad movie adaptation of a novel I didn’t like. I was barely holding it together through the entire run time. And then, once again, I dozed off in the last 10 seconds of the movie, so never got to see what actually happened at the end. Until today.
I needed a Peacock movie to watch and dammit if I didn’t say you know what, I’m gonna give this one another chance. I remember in 2020 thinking the trailer was excellent, it was the thing that made me want to see it in the first place. So maybe it was just those chatty girls behind me who ruined the movie and made me think it was bad.
Nope. Having watched from my own home with no one talking and just me focusing and NOT falling asleep, it is safe to say now, without a doubt, that THE TURNING is just a bad movie, period.
Mackenzie Davis plays Kate, a governess to Finn Wolfhard’s Miles and Brooklyn Prince’s Flora. I feel like, for this performance, director Floria Sigismondi told Finn to go full Wolfhard, getting him high on his own supply and really making him feel that ego that could only result from being the adoration of millions of middle school girls.
Kate is hired to replace the former governess, Miss Jessel, who disappeared in the night.
Ghostly happenings abound in the massive house, but none of them form a STORY, and the whole movie feels more like a series of vignettes where Kate relives the same ghostly encounter over and over, just in different parts of the house. The culprit, she comes to believe, is Quint, a former riding teacher for Miles, and all-around bad influence on the already troubled boy.
Mrs. Grose, the woman who runs the house since Miles and Flora’s parents died (if it’s ever mentioned how or when they died, I missed that detail), tells Kate that Quint can’t possibly be hanging around; she settled his hash but good. But every day, Kate still sees figures in the mirrors, feels hands crawling over her skin, and hears voices coming from behind closed doors.
I don’t remember the plot of the Henry James novel, I just remember being very very bored by it, but THE TURNING is the first of two adaptations of this novel I’ve seen (the second being the Mike Flannagan-helmed THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR, which turned out to be a very weak follow-up to his stellar THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE), and I haven’t been a big fan of either version, so maybe the fault lies mostly in the source material.
Mackenzie Davis gives her all to Kate, playing a woman who is trying to hold it together and do her job to the best of her ability under difficult circumstances, with this constant underlying doubt that she’s cut out for this gig, partly because she’s afraid her mother’s mental disorder might be genetic, and now with all the things she’s seeing and hearing around the house, is it real, or only in her mind? For a rotten movie, Davis is really trying to make a go of it.
The rest of the cast feel like they’re in a completely different movie, or maybe not in a movie at all, but just had free reign of this castle for the week and decided to let their true terrible selves out for a while. I did not like these characters.
But then, I didn’t like THE TURNING. My God, don’t even get me started on that ending. Seriously? That’s the ending you chose? I mean, I guess that’s one way to end things, right? Not the way any reasonable person who wants an already tedious movie to NOT piss off everyone who spent the time to watch it would end a movie, but hey what do I know?
Back to the source material. Look, if Mike Flannagan couldn’t get it right, it’s just got to be something baked into the novel that makes an adaptation impossible to pull off, so let’s all just stop trying and agree that everyone who says THE TURN OF THE SCREW is an important piece of horror fiction is just saying that because they think it’s expected, and not because they’ve read it and believe it.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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