The Turning had potential. The book it’s based on is an intricate drama of tightly coiled relationships with an unreliable narrator. A book that trusts the reader to wrestle with the subject matter for themselves and draw their own conclusions. This movie doesn’t do any of that.
The Turning starts off promising enough with deft camera work and an appropriately slow build up, but it quickly falls into a trap. The film wants to be consistently scary while also trying to honor its source material. The plot of the novel isn’t built to have a jump scare every ten minutes and every time it happens in this film it feels utterly ridiculous. There’s no sense of danger whatsoever until the final act and by then you won’t care.
The film could’ve just done that for ninety minutes and turned itself in for a C- and let us all move on. But no, the film really seems to think it’s doing something and the ending that they come up with is such an unearned, nonsensical attempt to mirror the novel that it tanked any remaining goodwill I had for this film. Henry James is turning in his grave.
Mackenzie Davis does her best, but the material is so stunted that she comes off extremely wooden, Finn Wolfhard is legitimately bad in this, the script does him no favors but I can’t help but feel nothing from his performance. Joyless and dreary performances to match the film itself.
The only saving grace this film has is quality cinematography that, while not groundbreaking keeps the film visually interesting enough to get you through it, all the way to the total bust of an ending.
3/10 Save your money.