Down a Dark Hall (2018)

Down a Dark Hall arrives from 2018 carrying the respectable burden of a Lois Duncan adaptation, which is to say it is a moody boarding school chiller with a famous actress in a severe haircut. Rodrigo Cortés directs Uma Thurman as Madame Duret, a headmistress who gathers five troubled girls into a remote Catalan mansion and extracts from them the genius of dead men. The production design is handsome. The pacing is not.

The story's architecture does invite a certain reading. Young women are farmed as vessels, their bodies and their waking hours spent so that the reputations of deceased male painters and mathematicians might continue. A viewer inclined toward gender critique could build a case here. The film declines to build it, preferring fog, candlelight, and the slow wasting of its heroines to any argument about who is permitted to create and who is merely consumed. The cast is largely female, with Taylor Russell and Victoria Moroles doing solid work, and the diversity of the ensemble registers as ordinary good hiring. Nothing in the script asks us to notice it.

The film leaves atmosphere and a handful of genuinely upsetting images of teenagers working themselves to death. No sermon is on offer. No lecture about the economy, the climate, or the body. The girls are called troubled, which here means sullen and inconvenient, not diagnosed in any modern vocabulary. Race goes unmentioned. So does class, though the mansion is very large and the girls are very rich. The film wants to unsettle, and on that modest errand it succeeds often enough to be forgiven its dim lighting and its habit of explaining itself in the final act. It is a haunted house story that never once stops to tell us what to think, which is either a limitation or a small mercy, depending on the appetite one brings to the table.