SPOILERS!
I didn’t like The Turning much, my review of which you can read here. One of the things that annoyed me most, and indeed it seems many others, is the baffling way in which the film ended. We saw Kate escaping the mansion alive and with both Miles and Flora in tow. But then the film then jumped back in time to a point that was about 20 minutes earlier. And then it cut to Kate in her mother’s cell and screaming at – something.
I guess we were supposed to assume that Kate had inherited her mother’s mental illness and had imagined most if not all of the film’s events, but it was very unclear what was real and what wasn’t, the time jumping was bizarre, and it just felt like a total bummer of a finish rather than a clever or shocking twist that made you feel disturbed or got you really thinking on the way home.
Anyway, speaking with ‘Collider’ this week, director Floria Sigismondi discussed said ending.
“Yeah, it’s a very ambiguous movie – it comes down to finding the essence of the scene, the feeling. I wanted people to experience the movie differently than they would experience another movie. Where you experience it more on an internal level. ‘What did I just experience?’ rather than ‘Oh, you can articulate the story in one sentence. I didn’t want to spoon-feed the audience. I was hoping that people can take away different things from the movie. To generate dialogue is what excites me. When I go see a film, and I’ve got something to say or a question, or it opens up something new in me…that’s what excites me about cinema, rather than being spoon-fed with a nice little bow at the end.”
Fair enough, I admire the intention – but I still feel that it was clumsily done, and, when asked what the ending means, Sigismondi wasn’t very enlightening:
“It’s the thematic idea of being locked in with this trauma that you’re dealing with. But I don’t want to say too much about it. The ending is different than the book– because I wanted the film to be different and surprising. I wanted to redeem Kate and tell a more emotional story.”
Apparently home releases of the film will contain an alternative ending. Will it be an improvement I wonder…..
Be the first to comment