The Turning (2020)

The Turning arrives with the haunted-house furniture fully assembled and nothing whatsoever plugged in. Floria Sigismondi, a director best known for music videos, takes Henry James' 1898 ghost story and relocates it to 1994, where the landlines, the flannel, and the general air of grunge melancholy do most of the atmospheric labor. Mackenzie Davis plays Kate, a governess hired to mind two children at a wealthy estate, and the film spends its runtime suggesting that something is wrong with the house, the children, or Kate herself. Then it stops. The CinemaScore of F suggests audiences felt the omission keenly.

For all that, the film's social consciousness is remarkably thin. There is a woman behind the camera and a woman at the center of the frame, and her account of events is repeatedly waved away as feminine hysteria, which lends the proceedings a faint progressive undertow. It never becomes an argument. The mental illness motif, inherited from Kate's institutionalized mother, exists to generate dread, not to affirm anyone. The Fairchild estate gestures at old money and hired help, but the class tension stays decorative. The cast is white to a degree that borders on the architectural. No racial themes, no queer subtext, no environmental anxiety, no sermonizing of any kind.

This is a film with no thesis, no message, and no interest in instructing its audience. It is, in the current taxonomy, nearly inert. That leaves a mood piece which squanders a good soundtrack and a genuinely unsettling premise on an ending that declines to explain itself. The soundtrack, reportedly, is better than the movie. That is a fair summary.