The Ending of The Turning Explained
The Turning. Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
The Turning is a weird movie. And many viewers, if they made it that far, were no doubt confused by the ending. Well, have no fear. I will explain the ending here for you.
The first thing to understand is that The Turning is based on Henry James’ classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw which, if I’m not mistaken, I was supposed to read when I was an undergraduate at UCLA but I never did. The book and the movie are about a governess who cares for two orphaned kids in a haunted house, basically. There has been some debate in the century since its publication whether James intended for the ghosts in his story to be real or merely in the mind of the governess, and that is why The Turning ended up turning toward its ambiguous and weird ending. It wanted to have it both ways.
Mackenzie Davis has not been having a very good few months. The Turning has a 12% on Rotten Tomatoes, and her appearance in Terminator Dark Fate didn’t do anyone any favors. I think the reason most people are disappointed with The Turning, aside from the baffling ending, is because it actually had a lot of promise. Good cast, respected source material, a proven haunted house narrative structure. But somehow they just couldn’t make it all come together; the film feels flat, and weirdly out of sync. It had a very troubled development and production history, so that no doubt explains a lot. But it doesn’t explain the ending.
Basically, Kate (Mackenzie Davis) is afraid of losing her mind and turning into her mother. Then she takes this job in the spooky mansion of an entitled, privileged family and starts to either slowly go insane or is genuinely in the presence of ghosts and she needs to figure out what is happening so she can save the kids. Finn Wolfhard, meanwhile, plays a kid who is either possessed by demons or just kind of a jerk.
At first, it appears the ghosts are real and she saves the kids, but then the narrative abruptly re-sets and shows us that actually she is losing her mind, and in the film’s final moments she has a complete break from reality and goes inside her own mind where she finds her mother and screams. Why does she scream? Because she realizes she has turned into her mother, and her worst nightmare has indeed come true.
Truthfully, that could have been an interesting idea, had it been developed better. It reminded me of psychological horror films from the 1970s, when the line between ambiguity and art was impossible to discern and would easily make your film high-brow as shit. But this is 2020, man. And while I think the meaning of that ending was pretty easy to parse, it doesn’t make it good, and it doesn’t make up for the lack of execution in the film leading up to it. So the ending is not earned, but at least it’s explained. It’s still just not a good film though. On the other hand, I cannot wait for Mike Flanagan’s adaptation, The Haunting of Bly Manor, which will be dropping on Netflix some time soon. With The Haunting of Hill House he showed us how to adapt a famous haunted house novel right.
