'The Turning' Review—Utterly Terrible

Life has many mysteries; to this day, many of us don't know the answers to questions such as who killed JFK? What's in Area 51? And most of all, who was the ninth president of the United States? Because I know for a fact that you have no idea who it was.

Today, I took a trip to my local movie theater, and I found myself asking another unanswered mystery of the universe: what the hell happened in The Turning?

Floria Sigismondi directs her first horror film with this adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. The movie stars Mackenzie Davis as Kate Mandell, a nanny who takes a new job at a house where she is in charge of two disturbed orphans, Miles and Flora, and as time goes on, strange events occur, and something sinister begins to arise.

I'm going to cut to the chase; The Turning is a terrible horror movie that fails due to its sheer repetitiveness and one of the worst film endings in recent memory.

When you have a critically acclaimed source material and a screenplay written by the writers of The Conjuring, it's hard to imagine how a movie could end up this much of a failure. Yet, this is a film that failed at one of the fundamental requirements of horror: being scary.

Sigismondi directs this film well, and there was consistent tension throughout the film. It's a very claustrophobic thriller, but it does not stand out amongst other horror movies.

Many of the scares are generic and forgettable. The film is less interested in having a unique story and more interested in having scene after scene of scares that generally have the same template: Kate walks around the house, something scary happens, rinse, repeat.

The film uses the dream sequence cliché, and it fails to leave a lasting impression on the audience with any creepy imagery or a story that we haven't seen a thousand times before.

It's a familiar haunted house movie that feels very one-note in its bland storytelling. The tension and fear the audience feels is a result of the fact that they know they're watching a horror film, and they're anticipating being scared.

However, while the film is mainly in one location and has a small cast, it fails to give a sense of isolation the way other one-location films have. For example, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining does a fantastic job of maintaining isolation and tension since the characters were trapped at the Overlook Hotel by the snow and were miles from civilization.

But this film does not have a sense of isolation because Kate could have left the house whenever she wanted. She wasn't trapped there; in fact, there's a scene in the movie where Kate does leave but then remembers that she promised the little girl that she would stay, so she goes back.

This reason may have been the weakest possible reason for staying at the house. For so much of this movie, Kate sees and hears strange things, and any rational human would know they were in danger, but she decides that because she made a promise to a troubled little girl, she has to stay.

As a result, the movie's events only occur because our protagonist is too stupid to leave. Kate has a backstory as well, where she states that she wants the children to grow up with a parental figure because her dad left her when she was very young.

However, Miles shows contempt for Kate throughout the film, and there is very little compassion between them, so if she was unwanted at the house, she should not have felt guilty about leaving them. But of course, she needed to stay in the home or else there would be no movie.

In terms of the performances, Finn Wolfhard and Brooklynn Prince seem to be trying a bit too hard to be creepy in their roles; while they could have been worse, these aren't the best performances that these actors have given.

Mackenzie Davis and Barbara Marten do an excellent job in their respective roles, and they escalate the material they were given. Still, not even they could save a script that was so repetitive, bland, and disjointed.

And this leads me to the worst part of the film: the ending, which will leave audiences scratching their heads through the credits, pondering its implications and how it was approved to play in theaters.

Once the end credits rolled, I was in a state of shock at this movie's complete lack of a resolution; I looked around at the audience members around me, and none of them looked as if they were reacting positively. I went on Twitter after the show, and nobody understood the ending of the film there either.

You know how every time a new movie comes out, you always get those YouTube videos that say "[movie title] - ENDING EXPLAINED!" I've never seen the point in those videos until I watched this movie's ending because while my reviews are spoiler-free, I couldn't spoil this movie even if I wanted to.

We have our final act of the film, and right when you think the film is about to end, it takes a turn and tries to do a twist, but this was one of the most poorly executed attempts at a big surprise ending that I have ever seen in a movie.

This film desperately wanted to be smart with its ending, but it felt extremely rushed as if they ran out of budget or took several ideas for a finale, put them in a bowl, and mixed them all to create a hodgepodge of gibberish.

So much of the film sets up a finale that we're expecting to be genuinely frightening, but instead, we had a conclusion that fails to resolve the story or its character journeys; the characters don't go anywhere, nor are they changed by the events we see.

Now, the issues with this film may be attributed to the problems most negatively received movies face, and those are production issues; this movie was originally going to be Haunted, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, and produced by Steven Spielberg.

However, following numerous issues and disagreements, Spielberg left the project, and we were left with this abomination of a horror film directed by Sigismondi, who displays some talent behind the camera with her transitions and symmetrical shots.

She has some good ideas for horror direction, as there are a few times in the film where we see faces in the background that we're not entirely sure if they're there, but she needs to have a unique directorial voice given how most of the film is quite bland.

While this is a very well-shot film, it is very generic in its storytelling and its characters. The scares lack in scares, and the story lacks in story. And the hopelessly jumbled ending of the film is the cherry on top of the worst, most tasteless excuse of an ice cream sundae.

Final Score: The Turning – 3/10 (D)

If you want my advice, don't watch this movie. Or maybe do watch it and tell me if you deciphered the ending. Or let me know if you can even locate the conclusion because there barely is one.

Now, if you want a good horror film, I'd say stay inside, keep the covers on, and watch The Shining. If you're going to take a trip to the movies, see Bad Boys for Life.

But trust me when I say that if you don't listen to me and watch this movie, you will leave the theater questioning why you spent your time on it at all.