![]() ![]() This film makes explicit the implied sexuality in the original, which isn’t necessarily a wrong thing to do at all, but everything is very ham-fisted and crass, with nothing like the ambiguous shimmer of the original story or the style and elegance of the 1961 Jack Clayton film version, The Innocents, with Deborah Kerr, and it almost entirely loses the exquisitely disturbing sense of children being able to see ghosts and keeping that a secret from the grownups. ![]() ![]() But it soon becomes clear that these eerie children had a very close relationship to the former governess, Miss Jessel, and former riding instructor Quint, whose awful fate lingers supernaturally in the gloomy corridors. The only other adult present is the fierce, gaunt housekeeper Mrs Grose (good stuff from Barbara Marten). ![]() Mackenzie Davis does her intelligent, assured best with the role of Kate, a young woman improbably hired in the olden-days job of “governess” (as opposed to, say, live-in nanny-slash-tutor) to two orphans in a remote mansion: 10-year-old Flora (a sparky Brooklynn Prince) and her stroppy teen brother Miles (Finn Wolfhard). And this they duly do, screamingly, pretty much every few minutes. This is a place with, in Withnail’s words, the kind of windows that faces look in at. It’s set in the 1990s (we kick off with a reference to Kurt Cobain) in a creepy old manor house supposedly in Maine. ![]()
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