For Millennials. By Millennials.
The Turning, a Universal Pictures’ film, hit the screens on January 24, 2020. It is an American Horror film, based on Henry James’ novel, The Turn of the Screw. Over the past, there have been many adaptations of the novel. The Turning’s cast includes; Finn Wolfhard, whom we have seen and loved in “Stranger Things” and “It”; Mackenzie Davis; and Brooklynn Prince. Even though the cast was good, the movie suffered and has garnered negative reviews overall.
The Turning | Production problems
The main problem was the film’s production history. Believe it or not, they started working on the adaptation in 2016, which was then called “Haunted”. The casting directors had Rose Leslie (John Snow’s Ygritte) in mind. Before the filming started, the development had already cost them around five million dollars. But despite this fact, Dreamworks ordered to improve the script. So they started work on the improvement, and The Turning became the title, and the cast was updated as well. The schedule of the film release was in 2019, but as we know, it happened in 2020.
Flop writing job
As I said, The Turn of the Screw has had many adaptations. Maybe it is because of this reason, that the writers of The Turning decided to step things up a little. The novel is basically set in 1898. And the first mistake the writers made was, they set The Turning in 1994. It just didn’t go with the whole thing, or maybe they didn’t try enough. Apart from that, the main critique has been about the poor writing and script of the film. The actors tried their best, but if the writing is weak, there is no way.
The talented Mr. Finn Wolfhard
He has mostly worked as a good boy in different films. For instance, Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things, he was a lovable loser. Then in Stephen King’s It, he tries to save the world from a weird clown. Again, in Ghostbusters, he is going to play a hero. So The Turning was something new for him. Well, not in the sense of genre, which for some reason has mostly been horror.
For Finn Wolfhard’s villainous role, he had to depict a serial killer in the making. In an interview, that took place between Finn Wolfhard and Vulture, we came to know that although it was difficult, he figured it out somehow. Additionally, we found that the young star is fond of writing and directing, more so, in the comedy genre. As it turns out, Finn Wolfhard’s favorite director is Roger Deakins. He fell in love with Deakins’ working style and talent while filming The Goldfinch.
The Turning has an IMDB score of 3.7/10. Pretty much all the reviews say something like this:
Despite the talented cast and atmospheric production design, this adaptation suffers from both a sluggish plot and an unnecessarily abrupt ending.
Have you seen the movie yet?