Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw, first published in 1898, is a delicious dissection of possession and paranoia that revolves around the sexual corruption (or not) of a 10-year-old boy.
With the backing of executive producer Steven Spielberg, writer twins Chad and Carey Hayes (The Conjuring) have done a lot of tweaking. They’ve shifted the story from 19th-century Essex to Maine in 1994, made the boy a lot older and removed a key character (the boy’s rich, irresponsible uncle).
As well as introducing soap-opera twists and one-note peripheral characters (a mad mum, a relentlessly cheerful roommate), they also drain the proceedings of logic and make a naff, feminist-lite attempt to address sexual harassment in the workplace. The Hayes brothers channel the spirit of a writer called James. But — shudder! — it’s EL James.
Arty, idealistic Kate (Mackenzie Davis) starts working as a live-in nanny for aristocratic, traumatised orphan Flora (The Florida Project’s Brooklynn Prince), who lives on a vast estate with bitter and twisted housekeeper Mrs Grose (Barbara Marten). Unexpectedly, Flora’s 15-year-old brother Miles (Stranger Things’s Finn Wolfhard) arrives home.
Miles and Flora gang up on Kate, so our heroine has no one to turn to when a malevolent phantom starts messing with her mind. That phantom, by the way, is a dead ringer for rascally looking food critic Jay Rayner. Which is to say, not very scary.
That The Turning contains a few jolting moments is mostly down to the gifted leads. Davis spills over with fragile warmth and Prince’s wide eyes are full of the “premature cunning” the story calls for. Meanwhile, Wolfhard — all cathedral-grand cheekbones and uncannily fecund curls — is as spitefully poised and “incredibly beautiful” as a Jamesian could wish for. Director Floria Sigismondi (who’s made pop videos for the genuinely out-there artist Yves Tumor) definitely has a good eye. The production design has an elegantly squalid, Grey Gardens vibe. If this was a Vogue fashion spread it would be a page-turner. Teens may well be intrigued. My 15-year-old daughter, mishearing the title, said: “The turn-on? That sounds good.”
Universal seem convinced they have a franchise on their hands (the ending sacrifices drama so as to make a sequel possible). But, whatever happens next, it’s depressing to think a transgressive novella that has inspired so much great art (including 1961 classic movie The Innocents) will now forever be linked to Spielberg’s timid, albeit photogenic, mess. The Turn of the Screw is guilty by association. James must be turning in his grave.
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