2020 has barely begun and we already have a contender for the most disappointing flick of the year. The latest attempt to adapt Henry James's brilliant novella for the screen looked to be a fun if campy exercise in moody, broody spookiness. I expected little else from director Floria Sigismondi, whose previous credits include mostly pop music videos and episodes of austere, stylized television (American Gods and The Handmaid's Tale). But nothing prepared me for the disaster waiting inside Bly this time around.
We start with a howling mess as a woman (we learn, later, to be Miss Jessel) flees Bly house only to be attacked by a brutish man at the gate. We turn (ha!) suddenly to the main story of Kate Mandell (Mackenzie Davis) who is leaving her teaching job to take over as the governess of Bly. Excuse me, it's 1994, she's not a governess; she's a... live-in tutor? It makes precious little sense, why the story would be "updated" but not placed in the present. I wondered if it would be nostalgic somehow -- more than once the film references the death of Kurt Cobain -- but it is staunchly not sentimental.
If you're familiar at all with The Turn of the Screw, you'll know that the central conceit of this Gothic masterwork is that the supposed narrator -- an unnamed governess, though her story as we read it is filtered several times -- may or may not be insane. There may indeed be ghosts in Bly. They may have driven her mad. Her madness may have invented the ghosts. Her madness may have provoked ghosts that were already there. She may be totally sane, or her internalized sexual repression may have pushed her far over the edge. These possibilities are perhaps even more terrifying than the haunted house or possessed children themselves, and so the ambiguity makes each ghostly visitation that much more gripping. This is even true of The Innocents, the 1961 adaptation that remains one of my favorite haunted house films.
Sigismondi's film, however, displays not only a tendency to ignore its source material but to incoherently plunge headfirst into murky narrative waters. While the early parts arguably follow the story of a teacher trying to adjust to isolated, manorly life while trying to connect with her charges, we know immediately this won't end well. Before Kate arrives at Bly, she visits her mother (Joely Richardson, and I'm baffled she ever said yes to this) in an insane asylum, with whom she seems to share a certain connection. Read: the apple doesn't fall far from the crazy tree. Kate is going to be portrayed as bonkers, because that's the decision these filmmakers have made for her. She is shown, in turns (ha!) to be an incompetent teacher, a horrible babysitter, and a generally dull if not downright unlikable person. Her charges are similarly unbearable; whereas James envisioned his children as sweet and mature far beyond their years, here Flora and Miles are monstrous from the get-go. They don't need to have been "corrupted", they were just born bad.
Bad as they are, Kate is unbearably patient and eager to continue her service. At one point, fed up with Miles's cruelty, she actually leaves the estate. Leaving, she stops to call her roommate at a pay phone and, while discussing the awfulness of working at Bly, decides to return. Nominally, it's to save face, as she had made a promise with Flora to never leave. But, like, she's a little girl and she'll get over it. How about saving yourself? It's this kind of absolute nonsense that gives horror flicks (especially heroines) a bad rep.
Even the technical aspects of the film fell woefully flat for me. Whirling cinematography, disjointed and distracting edits, an aggressive musical score, and blunt, obnoxious dialogue make the entire affair almost unwatchable. Brooklynn Prince is the only interesting part of the film, and her Flora manages to be as creepy as anything you might have hoped for. Finn Wolfhard is an exercise in lazy acting in his turn (ha!) as Miles, while the openly hostile housekeeper Mrs. Grose (Barbara Marten) is unsettling in a dusty, nasty old lady sort of way. There are almost no effective jump scares, and no enduring sense of dread or terror. The production design offers no points of interest, and the vine-covered ruin of Bly is less fear-inducing than annoying.
And then there's the ending. An unmitigated disaster, it takes the previous act of the film and utterly discounts it. We see Kate's discovery of Miss Jessel's raped, murdered body (again, why change the story in order to create yet another female victim?) and we see a ghost (or Kate?) flat-out murder Mrs. Grose before Kate safely escapes from Bly with her two young charges. Just as I was about to angrily shout at the screen and leave the auditorium, the frame zooms away from the car, driving into the night, and we see this is part of a painting. Specifically, a black painting with a distinctly Rorschach feel given to Kate earlier by her nutty mother. Kate has apparently imagined the preceding drama and is now totally convinced of the ghosts' presence. She assaults the children when they deny seeing the spirits, and laugh at her as being delusional. No closure, abrupt as hell, and utterly unsatisfactory. And that's the end.
Well, not quite the end. There's a bizarre moment where Kate again visits the asylum but when she goes to approach the figure resembling her mother, it turns and she screams. Is it her mother, or does she see herself? Was the whole mess in her head? Is she still being haunted, trapped in either the loony bin or the spooky old house? Does it even matter?
The answer is no. And as a matter of personal interest, I was perhaps most pissed off by the trailer's inclusion of Miles's pet tarantula crawling on his face, a scene not included in the theatrical cut of the picture. I'm going to pretend this movie never happened and, rather, look ahead to Mike Flanagan's adaptation in The Haunting of Bly Manor.
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