The Turning (2020)

JANUARY 23, 2020

GENRE: GHOST
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

You know you are getting old when a movie establishes its "period" setting with a news report of something you vividly remember happening. The Turning is based on Henry James' 19th century novella Turn of the Screw, but they didn't go back that far for this umpteenth adaptation (which will be adapted again later this year for Haunting of Bly House). Instead, after an opening scare scene that tells us something that's treated like a reveal later (the first of many signs of tinkering), we meet our protagonist Kate (Mackenzie Davis) as she listens to the breaking news that Kurt Cobain has committed suicide. Welcome to ye olden times of 1994, folks! And to my realization that we're now as far removed from that event as the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr were in 1994, i.e. something in history books. Christ, I am old.

However I'm not so old that I forget how movies work, but even if I was I still would have been joined by several other people in my (sparse) audience in shouting "Wait, WHAT?" (or other, more profane variations) when the credits began to roll. I am not a fan of hyperbole, but unless I am forgetting one I am comfortable saying that this movie has the most abrupt and baffling non-ending I have ever seen from a major studio release. Yes, the James novella ended ambiguously and one could expect a certain degree of "it's up to you to decide" in this one's climax, but... it doesn't HAVE a climax. The movie literally just stops cold after what seems like a setup for a twist ending that would run another ten minutes; if I hadn't been warned ahead of time that the movie's ending was so sudden, I would have been convinced that the DCP had a glitch and it somehow skipped over a chunk.

I say that mostly as a warning; I'll get into specifics later but I wanted to address the film's last minute collapse because I don't want my review to have the same effect as the movie in that it's perfectly fine until throwing a curveball (and ending the game before it gets to the batter, to keep the metaphor going). The 1994 setting aside, it's more or less faithful to the story - Kate is hired to take care of two orphaned children (Flora and Miles) in their stately manor after their previous "governess" (live-in nanny) left under mysterious circumstances, and the only other person in the house is Mrs. Grose, a suspicious housekeeper. Kate is there for all of twelve seconds when she starts seeing and hearing things, yadda yadda - and the ghosts seem to be affecting both children and Kate, but is it... all in her head?

Most of this material is fine. Davis and the two child actors (Finn Wolfhard and Brooklynn Prince) are quite good, and Barbara Marten as Mrs. Grose is the MVP, unnerving me far more than any of the ghost stuff with her strict demeanor and slavish devotion to the family. And the estate itself is a terrific location (the Killruddery House in Ireland); the story is set in America (I heard Maine, but I don't recall any particular state being mentioned) but they were wise to use a European manor to give it the gothic flair that is somewhat muted by the "modern" setting. Speaking of which, there's no real reason for it to be set in 1994 instead of 2020 (or 2018, when it was shot); the place is isolated enough to have the "no cell phone" thing working for it anyway and apart from the Cobain news report there's nothing else to firmly establish the time period. Once she gets to the house she only leaves the grounds once, so beyond having a car and a phone to call her friend and dump some of her inner monologue in conversation for the viewer's benefit ("I think Miles hates me" kind of stuff), I can't see anything about the movie being different regardless of what year it took place.

As for the scares, they're... well, I dunno. As I've said in the past, I usually use the crowd to gauge such things since I always see them coming a mile away, but the audience was too scattered to really judge - I didn't really hear much of anything until the end. There's a decent enough one with a mannequin that works mainly because it comes right after a more traditional dud one, so we're not expecting another so soon, but otherwise we will have to assume that the poster and trailer's assurances that it's from the writers of The Conjuring only serve to prove that maybe it was someone else who made that movie as scary as it was. But the real issue, and now we have to get into spoiler territory, is that the antagonist ghost, Quint, is a nothing entity; he's dead before the movie starts, we learn almost nothing about him until the movie's almost over, and he makes most of his 30-40 seconds' of screentime (a generous estimate) in quick shots in a mirror or window. The story and other filmed versions get into the idea that the ghosts of him and Ms. Jessel (the previous nanny) are possessing the children, but that never really comes across here outside of a nightmare scene where Quint and Miles seem to be blending together. We learnt that Quint was an abusive man who seemingly raped Ms. Jessel, but when Miles makes inappropriate comments to Kate every now and then it just comes off as a hormonal, spoiled teenager acting on his impulses, not possession by an older man. If you weren't familiar with the story, you'd probably never make that connection.

Plus, as I mentioned, the opening scene seems to have been added later, because it's pretty clear that Ms. Jessel is dead from what we see in it, yet throughout the movie we're told she just left and the discovery of her body is presented as something that we should be surprised by, so I can only assume that opening scene was added later to get the movie a quick scare at the top so audiences didn't have to wait a whole fifteen minutes to get to the first natural one (if that's the case, then at least I'll give them credit for not doing a flash forward). Then you consider that some of the trailer's big moments (i.e. the spider in Finn's mouth) do not appear in the film, and that Kate has some troubled history with her mother (Joely Richardson) that is never fully established or explained, and you realize that you're probably watching a hacked up version of what was probably a longer (read: slower) but more coherent movie.

But that's the usual kind of stuff - those other movies that might come to mind (Halloween 6, for example, where it would race through any scene of people explaining the plot) at least had identifiable climaxes, something this movie lacks. At first it seems like there's one, albeit a rather uneventful one - things get hectic, Miles finally snaps out of his "evil" mode and sides with Kate, and she puts the kids in her car to drive them away from the house to safety. A nice overhead shot shows them leaving the grounds, and then, out of nowhere, the movie flashes back ten minutes to an earlier scene where Kate got some creepy charcoal sketches from her mother. This time the scene ends a bit differently, then instead of the escape she visits her mother in the institution, and... then the credits roll. That's it. The fate of the children (and Mrs. Grose, who - spoiler again - dies in the "other" ending) is left unknown, we're not sure if she's really at her mother's or if it's a dream, we're never told what the black drawings are, etc.

Even a "she was just crazy and saving the children was all in her head" explanation doesn't work, because we see a ghost before she even arrives there, and a mannequin moves on its own without her or anyone else there to witness it. And Kate's fear of turning out like her mother doesn't have enough material to register - most audience members will have forgotten about the character by the time she re-enters the story by sending the unexplained sketches, and since we are seeing other people have their own scares (Flora won't leave the grounds because she fears she will die, Miles clearly sees Quint's ghost at one point), it never once has that "is she crazy or is this happening" element that is essential for that kind of material to work. Clearly, too many pieces of the puzzle were left out, either by hasty post-editing, endless rewrites (the film was announced with a completely different cast and director as far back as 2016), or some combination of the two.

Worse, it's got the 1994 setting (and somewhere, per the credits, a Screaming Trees CD - at one point she gives an album to Miles that we can't quite see, so let's assume that's it) but no actual '90s music! I was all excited thinking we'd get to hear some old-school grunge, but instead the handful of songs we hear are from modern indie bands? Nothing popular enough to send off the anachronistic alarms to anyone but those bands' fans, since they sound more or less like some of the smaller outfits of the time, but still an odd choice when they went out of their way to establish 1994 in such a grim way and then do nothing else with the dating. Perhaps that got jumbled along the way, too?

Apparently, Spielberg was once heavily involved here; he shepherded the project from its early development and was reportedly on set when filming began, per news reports of the time (the director has recently denied this, for the record). However, his name does not appear on the final version, which is perhaps even more evidence of what a mess this thing is, and another red check on Universal, coming off Cats and Dolittle (also nightmarish productions; at least this one was cheap). A handful of good performances and some nice Gothic atmosphere aside, the only reason to see this movie is to have some context for the day when we see a director's cut or get some concrete behind the scenes info, and also to maybe apologize to William Brent Bell for whatever angry outburst you had at the ending of The Devil Inside. That movie's Return of the King-style conclusive in comparison to this one.

What say you?

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