Cakes Takes The Turning Movie Review

So I watched this movie just because I wanted to watch a good horror movie. I also think that Finn Wolfhard is going to do good work in the future as an actor if he stays on the route he’s on now. However, I was let down with the movie as a whole. It was very slow paced, dark in content and in color, it had a more convoluted plot than necessary and I thought it wasn’t scary at all and didn’t really take a lot of time to be either.

The film did put my faith in child actors more though, as both Finn and Brooklyn both did well in their roles. Both of them can act! The emotions that they were required to emote for their roles were pretty dark and I think they nailed it entirely. The disturbed role of the older young man that Finn played to a tee and the distressed (but conduit for ghosts) little girl that Brooklyn played. They both made me believe what they were selling me as actors. Most kids in acting or as main characters are written poorly with bad dialogue as well, but these two made me want better movies and roles for serious child actors. I think the kids are what saved this movie from being total BS to me because of their acting skills, not because of the story.

To me the children really outshined their adult costar, Mackenzie Davis, who played Kate, the children’s newly hired nanny. To me a lot of the story and the movie as a whole suffers from her being so boring to me. Her character was so bad to me that it seemed like it slowed the whole story down. The times where she was on the screen to me, I wanted to cut back to the kids and their story and follow them around for context and plot rather than her. I don’t believe I‘ve seen the actress in anything else before so I can’t say if it’s her as an actress, but more than likely, it’s just the writing for this movie.

The story itself was the only thing that didn’t make as much sense as it should have to me. The abrupt ending made my skin crawl because it made even less sense than the plot did to me. It only made more questions arise than I had answers for. I feel like the movie started off great and I liked the potential that it had. Even the premise that the movie set up was good but it didn’t rise to the occasion.

It did do the job that most book to movie adaptations do for me; made me want to read the book that the movie was based on, but in the worst way possible. Which the book book that this was based on was entitled, ‘The Turn of the Screw’. I assume that the book is far better than this adaptation is but I have never heard of it so now I feel like I have to look into to get that bad movie experience taste of watching this film out of my mouth.

I am not a huge fan of plot based ambiguous films, unless it’s for the purpose of a second part or a series of some sort, so the ending of this movie never would have pleased me. However, I can appreciate the vibes that they were going after overall. Good acting from the children and the older cast but lousy writing.

I think the worst part about the film is just that it bores me to pieces mostly and that it wasn’t scary whatsoever. I just feel the execution was poor and if they were going for an ambiguous ending then they should have had a better and less confusing plot to base the entire movie on, so there would be substance behind the ambiguity but there’s nothing really there. I would say watch this film if you don’t have anything to watch and you want to watch a slower paced filmes horror movie. Or maybe watch it if you don’t love being scared by horror movies but still enjoy watching them.