The Turning (2020) Review

Disclaimer: Contains spoilers!

Plot Summary: Pretentious filmmakers spew visual vomit that will waste 90 minutes of your life that you will never get back.

Review: There is shit, fucking shit, absolute fucking shit, and then there is "The Turning." I can say, without question, this is the worst movie I have ever watched theatrically. Thank god the AMC pass is mitigating the cost here or else I'd be ready to murder. I would have walked out had I known the movie would suddenly drop out right when a third act should have kicked in. "The Turning" is feasibly, like, half a film. What the hell happened?! This is like someone saw Chekhov's gun as a challenge of how many nonsensical plot tangents they could include that amount to nothing. We are beyond good and evil here...this is painting the Creation of Adam on the ceiling of your padded cell using only shit.

A nanny goes to stay at some haunted house with weird kids, a creepy maid or whatever, and seemingly ghosts. The filmmakers will then bombard you with a series of unconnected plot points that mean squat. We've got horses and one that won't obey anyone but the boy, a weird mannequin, paintings of the past, setting the film in the '90s, a crazy mom, dead parents, creepy objects all over the house, swans, spiders, and it goes on and on and on and on. If I had the stomach to re-watch this disgrace to cinema, I would love to count off how many times the camera focuses on something that never connects to the plot whatsoever. In fact, what fucking is the plot even? Scary shit is supposed to happen, RIGHT? Wrong. After dragging on endlessly--putting up with these stupid winks at the audience as if it means anything--we finally get an extremely lackluster ghost story that wraps up in about two minutes. BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

So you thought this would be the end? Oh, no, no, no...everything we just saw wasn't real. The main chick is just imagining everything. Nothing is real...or is it? The main chick then wakes up in a bed and sees her mom's face--which we don't get to see--and screams horribly. THE END! Dear lord, help me. You can just feel that "what does it mean" pretentiousness coming through the screen. Truly painful. Just when the film is setting up the big reveal--that final payoff--we are supposed to get answers, but, instead, we are cheated out of a last act and treated to the most abrupt and random credit roll I may have ever seen. Rarely have I felt this cheated by a movie, and I've gone over some of the dumbest fucking shit known to cinema (just check some of my reviews).

My best guess--and this is already more effort than this movie deserves--is that it's all in the mom's head. Her paintings semi-correspond to the story unfolding, and she paints in an old pool which could connect to the whole drowning motif depicted. The mom paints Kate's portrait and envisions her doing the things we see. This could also explain why the film is set in the '90s as that may have been the last time the mom had a grasp on reality; time has stood still to her. As such, I believe Kate is how she sees herself--and maybe that was how she looked when young--which is why Kate screams when she sees the mom's face at the end; it's her coming to terms with the fact that they're the same person. If you follow this perspective I think we can almost fill in all the missing holes if we go super pretentious to match the filmmakers.

I cannot stress this enough: DO NOT waste your time or money on this travesty. You will be very angry by the time those credits slam into your face out of nowhere. Yeah, yeah, I've covered worse movies, but you can't equally compare something like "Severed" or "Sleepaway Camp IV" to something with a real budget. "The Turning" has no excuse to be this bad, and do not even blame it on the source material; this is closer to the crackhead version of the original story. And now that this review is over, let us never dwell on this trash ever again.

Notable Moment: When the credits roll. I'm not trying to make a joke here--the suddenness of the film ending was probably the biggest twist you could imagine. Besides, third acts of a story are for pussies!

Final Rating: 3/10