The Turning - La casa del male

Kate Mandell (Mackenzie Davis) takes on the job of tutoring Flora Fairchild (Brooklynn Prince) at an English estate. She is constantly harassed by Flora's older brother Miles (Finn Wolfhard). Caretaker Mrs. Grose (Barbara Marten) tells her that Flora is haunted by the death of her parents.

This sets up a good moody horror and it has some good actors. After setting everything up, the plot basically stops moving and developing. It feels stuck in place and the story becomes a muddle. Then the movie truly stops in a confused abrupt ending. The style is like an old horror ghost story which is intriguing. If only, the story would flow better than this.

I really wanted to give it three stars, but going over my notes plus how the movie felt - not justified. Positives: Unfortunately, there are none. Except they mentioned Kurt Cobain which had nothing to do w/anything, and not mentioned again. Negatives: Always a sign of cheapness is an opening (twice in this case) overhead view of a car on road. Heavily dependent on the overused, stereotypical, music & sound effects to startle you. Yawn. The usual ghostly apparitions in mirrors, windows, and in background. Very uncreative, and cheap looking. The usual isolated mansion/house w/lots of rooms w/stuff, and usual dark basement. And, a maze garden. A brief scene of a creepy tree which had no bearing on anything. Supposedly scary scenes in which our future victim has portending nightmares, and of course we don't know they're just dreams. Future victim, unfortunately in this genre is female, does not respond intelligently to what's going on. Ending, and alternative ending which was worse, was one of those "viewer decides" could be anything.

I didnt hate this as much as others have here. No, it wasnt particularly scary. But I liked the actors in it and I felt they were doing their best. And knowing the book its based off of, I felt it followed the plot relatively well with some minor adjustments. I just think the book or even the Netflix miniseries did a better job with atmosphere. For me, the biggest let down of the film is that ends so abruptly. The film really needed like an additional 10 minutes just to try and tie everything up.

It was like watching an hour and a half movie trailer. You get left wanting to know what happens...

There are quite a few jump scares, but the plot is just really thin. There are so many unanswered questions. For example, is Finn really trying to make life hard for the governess, or is he possessed? The ending is just really abrupt, I literally gasped "What?" because I just don't know what really happened in the whole film. The two endings, which one is real? Is she crazy? It is very confusing.