The Turn­ing

“This can’t be real,” exclaims Kate (Macken­zie Davis) as she enters the vast Fairchild estate (sup­pos­ed­ly some­where coastal in the US, but in fact Kill­rud­dery House in Coun­ty Wick­low, Ire­land) where she has been hired as live-in gov­erness for young, orphaned Flo­ra (Brook­lynn Prince).

Indeed, with its out­door labyrinth, its death­ly silent cor­ri­dors, its for­bid­den wing and its creepy base­ment, this place seems to belong as much to the imag­i­na­tive world of the goth­ic genre as to any kind of real­i­ty. In these hall­ways, fes­tooned with dolls, por­traits, man­nequins, stat­ues and oth­er sim­u­lacra of the liv­ing, as well as with ubiq­ui­tous mir­rors to catch details that the eye miss­es, it is easy, as the long-serv­ing Mrs Grose (Bar­bara Marten) points out to Kate when she first arrives, to ​‘get lost’.

The most imme­di­ate ref­er­ence point here is Hen­ry James’ 1989 novel­la ​‘The Turn of the Screw’, which was also the inspi­ra­tion for Jack Clayton’s The Inno­cents, Michael Winner’s pre­quel The Night­com­ers and most recent­ly William Lima Jr’s Through the Shad­ow. From James’ work, writ­ers (and twin broth­ers) Chad and Carey W Hayes have express­ly adapt­ed their screen­play and appro­pri­at­ed the names of all their characters.

Yet if the title ​‘The Turn­ing’ points as much to a devi­a­tion from source as to the source itself, the sto­ry has indeed been con­sid­er­ably updat­ed. Kate may joke that she has not been a live-in gov­erness ​“since the 1880s”, but in fact the film takes place in 1994 (news of Kurt Cobain’s death is heard in the back­ground). Kate, like her pre­de­ces­sor Miss Jes­sel (Den­na Thom­sen), dri­ves a car, the gates to the estate open elec­tron­i­cal­ly, and Flora’s old­er, more men­ac­ing broth­er Miles (Finn Wolfhard) noo­dles on an elec­tric guitar.

Yet despite all these sig­ni­fiers of change and moder­ni­ty, the past keeps find­ing a way to impose its ghost­ly influ­ence on the present. Much as Kate wins over Flo­ra by point­ing to the sense of child­hood loss that, for all their oth­er dif­fer­ences, they share, and teach­ing her young ward to put on a ​“brave face” as a mask against life’s pres­sures, the his­to­ries of these two women returns to haunt them and to send their con­joined nar­ra­tive down diver­gent paths.

As buried secrets rise to the sur­face, as Kate finds she can no longer trust even what she sees in the mir­ror, as iden­ti­ties and influ­ences blur, and as the con­fines of the estate prove dif­fi­cult – per­haps impos­si­ble – to escape, The Turn­ing dif­fers from James’ orig­i­nal sto­ry. But it stays true to the spir­it of the novella’s noto­ri­ous­ly sus­tained ambi­gu­i­ties, ulti­mate­ly leav­ing the view­er, along with Kate, utter­ly lost.

The film, too, has long been stuck in lim­bo. It began in 2016 under the title Haunt­ed, as a pas­sion pro­duc­tion for Steven Spiel­berg, with Juan Car­los Fres­nadil­lo set to direct. But, $5 mil­lion into its devel­op­ment, the whole process was restart­ed and the title altered to The Turn­ing, with a new cast attached and acclaimed music video direc­tor Flo­ria Sigis­mon­di, who pre­vi­ous­ly made the Joan Jett biopic The Run­aways, now at the helm. The fin­ished film was sched­uled for an ear­ly 2019 release, then shelved for a year.

The rea­son for this delay may for­ev­er remain a mys­tery, but per­haps there is an uneasi­ness among dis­trib­u­tors about releas­ing hor­ror cin­e­ma that fails to explic­it­ly resolve its heady con­fu­sion of the super­nat­ur­al and the psy­cho­log­i­cal. Sigismondi’s film has all the rich, spooky atmos­phere and shad­ow play – all the hide-and seek and impos­si­ble appari­tions – of a well-turned ghost sto­ry. But the pos­si­bil­i­ty that it may not even be one will rep­re­sent the biggest chal­lenge for view­ers inclined to want to pin down the object of their errant desire.

The slip­pery, liq­uid spaces of equiv­o­ca­tion, how­ev­er, will always be where the uncan­ny is best realised. And while The Turn­ing does not exact­ly rein­vent the creepy wheel, it cer­tain­ly gives anoth­er turn of the screw to James’ unset­tling tale, while reflect­ing upon its themes of trans­fer­ence and pro­jec­tion through a glass darkly.