94 min | PG-13 | January 24, 2020 | Universal Pictures
A young governess takes a live-in job caring for two orphaned children in a vast country estate. The house has secrets, the children have a dead caretaker they will not stop talking about, and Kate starts seeing things in the dark. Then the movie ends like someone unplugged it mid-sentence.
Kate arrives at a sprawling Maine estate to tutor two orphaned children. The girl, Flora, is sweet and clingy. The boy, Miles, gets expelled from boarding school and comes home cruel. The previous governess vanished, the riding instructor died, and the grounds feel haunted by both. This is an adaptation of Henry James and it wants to ask whether the ghosts are real or whether Kate is losing her mind. It never decides, and it mistakes that indecision for depth.
Mackenzie Davis plays Kate as earnest and increasingly frayed, but the script gives her terror without cause and reactions without payoff. Finn Wolfhard plays Miles as a teenage predator-in-training, all smirks and menace, and the performance has exactly one note that he hits over and over. Brooklynn Prince does the most genuine work as Flora, a frightened child who clings to the only adult who shows up for her. Joely Richardson appears as Kate’s institutionalized mother in scenes that signal a twist the film lacks the nerve to commit to. The actors gesture at a psychological unraveling that the writing never builds underneath them.
Floria Sigismondi directs with a music-video eye, and the production design does heavy lifting that the screenplay does not. The estate is dressed with taxidermy, dolls, and dust, and cinematographer David Ungaro shoots it in cold blues and shadow that promise dread the story cannot deliver. The score and sound design lean on stingers and slamming doors to manufacture jolts on a schedule. Chad Hayes and Carey Hayes write toward an ambiguity between haunting and madness, then abandon both threads in a final sequence that simply stops. The ending does not resolve the question. It refuses to acknowledge there was one.
A gothic ghost story needs to commit to either the supernatural or the psychological, and this one circles both without choosing. The atmosphere is real and the cast is willing. The script squanders every setup it plants and saves nothing for the harvest. What remains is a handsome haunted house with a story that walks out the door before the lights come up.