When you put a pair of creepy young orphans in a mansion, things are bound to get spooky. There’s an endless void of sinister possibilities that can exist within a mysterious estate. And when a new nanny gets involved, bless her soul, for she’s cursed with the journey of discovering and exploring the hauntedness. Based on Henry James’ novella, “The Turning of the Screw,” “The Turning” will finally come to theaters with a familiar haunted house premise backed by a solid cast.
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This horror fantasy stars Mackenzie Davis—who made her name on AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire,” and now is one of the stars of the upcoming “Terminator” reboot— as the new nanny who is assigned to look after two disturbed orphans. The two orphans are played by Finn Wolfhard, who’s had an unbeaten run in “Stranger Things” and “IT,” and Brooklyn Prince, who had her notable breakout in the endearing A24 drama, “The Florida Project.” It’ll be intriguing to see the horror level this pair will bring to the table, as they expand their young careers with this film.
“The Turning” is directed by Floria Sigismondi, whose career has spanned from music videos (Marilyn Manson, David Bowie) to television (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) to film (“The Runaways”). Sigismondi has always had a creepy, horror-ish, supernatural bent to her music video work, so it’s interesting to see her finally tackle horror in a feature-length film.
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The story has been told in film before, most notably in Jack Clayton’s classic 1961 horror, “The Innocents.”
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“I studied what worked in that film, and the atmosphere it created, and how the house became a character, and what we saw and didn’t see,” Sigismondi told EW this week. “I also loved how that film made it about the nanny and not just about the things that were happening in the house. So, I really drew upon those things, and modernized it, and made it my own.”
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The issue, however, “The Turning” was originally scheduled for release earlier this year in February, and it finished production back in the spring of 2018—that’s a decent-sized delay for a movie that’s not a gigantic blockbuster, but it’s here, and perhaps they’ve figured out the bugs or whatever prevented its delay at the beginning of 2019.
Here’s the official synopsis.
For more than 100 years, a deeply haunting tale has been passed down to terrify audiences. “The Turning” takes us to a mysterious estate in the Maine countryside, where newly appointed nanny Kate is charged with the care of two disturbed orphans, Flora and Miles. Quickly though, she discovers that both the children and the house are harboring dark secrets, and things may not be as they appear.
“The Turning” is scheduled for release on January 24, 2020, by Universal Pictures. Watch the first trailer below.
