The Turn of the Screw (1999)
Directed by Ben Bolt
In a mid-19th century Essex country house, a young governess for two children becomes convinced that the house and grounds are haunted by ghosts and that the children are being possessed.
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What critics compared The Turn of the Screw to
Debuting feature director Juan Antonio Bayona and first-time feature writer Sergio G. Sánchez have fashioned a chiller with direct echoes of The Others, along with debts to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
Contrary to its title, The Orphanage is a movie with many forebears, starting with Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents, The Others and the whole cycle of possessed child movies from the seventies and eighties, including from The Exorcist, The Omen and Poltergeist.
The disappearance and the arrival of scientific ghost hunters (led by Geraldine Chaplin) are reminiscent of "Poltergeist" (1982), although Bayona more frequently strives for the rarefied psychological suggestiveness of "The Haunting" (1963) and Henry James' novella "The Turn of the Screw" (as well as its 1961 movie adaptation, "The Innocents").
But like unsuccessful 1972 and 92 visualizations of Henry Jamess suggestive The Turn of the Screw, and in contrast to the excellent 1961 Deborah Kerr-Michael Redgrave interpretation, The Orphanage tritely twists too many specious screws too often, and it depends heavily on creaking woodwork and hinges, slammed doors and secret panels giving onto basement stairs, on thunderclaps, crypts, apparitions, sinister children and mental instability.
Bayona is a resourceful but soulless manipulator, bogging down intriguing themes of supernatural dread and spiritual redemption in motherhood with torpid, recycled tropes (many lifted from Guillermo Del Toro, who "presents" the film) and a group of spectral children that aims for Peter Pan and The Turn of the Screw but instead ends up far closer to The Goonies.
At its best, Alejandro Amenabar's "The Others" is reminiscent of "The Innocents," Jack Clayton's marvelously creepy 1960 version of Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw."
Derivative though masterfully shot, the movie echoes Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, though if Kidman's character weren't so sympathetic, you could call this The Turn of the Shrew.
It is complex and literate, as psychologically unnerving as Henry James’ novel The Turn of the Screw.
Del Toro and Muschietti at their best channel Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” and Jack Clayton’s arty adaptation “The Innocents.”
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This week, the sublime becomes ridiculous, and the ridiculous becomes a trip, in two updates of horror classics considered high points of their masters’ voices: Floria Sigismondi’s The Turning, an adaptation of Henry James’s 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw, set in 1994, and Richard Stanley’s present-day Color Out of Space, based on H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short story, “The Colour Out of Space.”
Whereas many contemporary horror films are deeply invested in postmodernism—knowingly quoting the aesthetics of Eighties horror, employing camp, or being reflexive in other ways (e.g., casting)—del Toro’s film draws primarily upon earlier, literary works, and their film adaptations: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca .
Like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (and thereafter Jack Clayton’s The Innocents ) , the real focus here is not the supernaturally afflicted child but the psychologically disquieted adult.