There are bad adaptations, there are misfires, and then there’s In a Dark Place, which plays like someone photocopied The Turn of the Screw until the toner ran out and then staged the smudges. It’s the kind of modernized update that confuses “present day” with “presently dull,” swapping Victorian repression for voicemail exposition and calling it a take. If Henry James wrote a labyrinth of ambiguity, this movie is the gift-shop maze you let your toddler run through while you stare at your phone.
Leelee Sobieski, who often looks like she’s listening to a more interesting film in her head, stars as Anna, an art teacher demoted to full-time boundary disaster. After a headmaster scene that manages to be both skeevy and inert—like a wet handshake—she lands a too-good-to-be-true nanny position at Bly House. The film’s big premise shift is “What if The Turn of the Screw, but Craigslist?” Off she goes to a remote mansion where the sunlight is rationed, the children are suspiciously angelic, and the estate manager (Tara Fitzgerald) has that “I’m not mad, I’m British” glare welded to her skull.
Right away you sense the production is stretching a nickel into taffy. Bly’s interiors look less like an aristocratic estate and more like a museum wing that only opens on Tuesdays. The camera seems allergic to movement; the editing resembles a sedated metronome. It’s the “slow burn” approach, except someone forgot the “burn.” Scenes amble in, sit down without introducing themselves, and stare at you until you cough.
As Miles and Flora, the two enigmatic cherubs, Christian Olson and Gabrielle Adam are deployed mostly as décor with eyebrows. Their job is to enter hallways at slightly incorrect angles, say unnervingly cheerful things, and then depart before you can ask why the dialogue sounds like it was translated from English to English by a haunted thesaurus. The script hints at dark histories, power games, and transgressions past, but rarely stages anything concrete; instead, it scatters bread crumbs into a fan and asks you to admire the mess.
Sobieski is tasked with playing a woman unraveling—past trauma, present pressure, possible hauntings—but the film gives her very little texture to unravel from. Her Anna is written as a series of neon signs: Caring! Confused! Concerned but Ethereal! When the story leans hard into ambiguity (Are the ghosts real? Is Anna projecting?), we should feel claustrophobic in her perspective. Instead, we feel like we’re watching a neighbor argue with her thermostat. You can almost hear the director whisper “underplay everything” and the actors sprinting with the note beyond the horizon.
The “present day” setting could have been fertile: surveillance, therapy-speak, institutional failure, all refracted through a gothic lens. Instead, modernization mostly means flip phones and an answering machine monologue so baldly explanatory it should be in a trench coat. We ping-pong between murky corridors and even murkier psychology, as if the film thinks dimmer lighting equals deeper meaning. It doesn’t. It just equals me squinting at my TV muttering, “Who turned off the plot?”
Tonally, the movie sits on a rickety fence between serious trauma study and ghost-story dread, impaling itself in the process. The original novella’s genius is that the horror could be spectral or psychological, and both readings are terrible. Here, the film reduces the uncertainty to a shrug. Apparitions appear with all the force of a screensaver. A lakeside climax arrives that should knock the wind out of you; instead, it’s staged like two people considering a canoe rental. The aftermath tries for morally queasy ambiguity and lands on, “Okay, but… so what?”
Tara Fitzgerald’s Miss Grose should be our ballast—sensible, watchful, a human lie detector. The movie briefly perks up whenever she’s onscreen, if only because Fitzgerald can convey more with a blink than some scripts manage with monologues. But even she’s stranded by the film’s habit of hinting at charged dynamics and then abandoning them in the foyer. Relationships pivot on a dime without emotional math. Revelations are dropped like lost umbrellas: noticed, then forgotten.
Visually, In a Dark Place chooses a desaturated pallor that, in theory, whispers tasteful dread. In practice it looks like your TV is pleading for iron supplements. The compositions are tidy (credit where due), but the mise-en-scène is aggressively non-committal: doors, curtains, lakes, mirrors, repeat. It’s the Ikea showroom of gothic signifiers—everything recognizable, nothing lived in. The score pads along behind like a nervous chaperone, offering tasteful “boo?”s that don’t so much scare as politely inquire whether you’re in the mood to be scared.
Dark humor opportunity abounds when a movie takes itself this seriously while accomplishing so little, but the real joke here is structural: for a story built on suggestion, this adaptation suggests mostly that it would rather be over. Scenes that should ache with subtext are played like HR training videos. Whenever the children do something “off,” the camera leans in as if to say, “Did you catch that?” Yes, we did. Now what? The answer is frequently: more corridor.
The ghosts, such as they are, have the charisma of calendar models. Quint and Jessel—central, charged figures in the novella—drift through like underpaid extras from a theme-park haunt. They’re meant to embody dangerous adult desire haunting the nursery; here, they embody scheduling conflicts. The film can’t decide whether it wants them literal, metaphorical, or cautionary PowerPoint, so it splits the difference until there’s no difference left.
There’s also a baffling reluctance to stage the story’s key fulcrums with any dramatic muscle. Confrontations that should snap end in ellipses. Climactic choices arrive fogged by a directorial “Let’s keep it vague” that reads, frankly, as “Let’s keep it easy.” Ambiguity is not the same as opacity. The former invites interpretation; the latter invites naps.
If there’s a mercy, it’s that the running time is merciful. The film lurches to its ending with a final image that aims for chilling resonance and lands on art-school screensaver. The last line—an attempt at thematic ring composition—arrives like a fortune cookie written by someone who skimmed the Wikipedia entry on Henry James and then forgot to eat dinner.
Do any pieces work? Occasionally. A few compositions have true gothic poise. Fitzgerald wrings some juice from arid scenes. Sobieski, when allowed to show panic rather than whisper it, flashes the intensity that made her such a striking presence elsewhere. And the setting—Bly’s grounds and that cursed lake—has innate creep potential that peeks through despite the film’s best efforts to tuck it in.
But as an adaptation, In a Dark Place is less Jamesian ambiguity than James-adjacent lethargy. It mistakes manner for mood, whispers for wit, grayscale for gravitas. Setting the story in the now could have illuminated how modern institutions disguise harm under civility. Instead, it illuminates how to make ninety minutes feel like a long hallway.
Bad movies are often loud. This one is bad quietly—courteous, careful, and catastrophically beige. It’s a horror film that behaves itself into oblivion, polishing the silverware while the house falls down. If you’re looking for a fresh take on The Turn of the Screw, look elsewhere. If you’re looking for a case study in how not to transpose haunted ambiguity into contemporary keys, well, welcome to Bly: check in at dusk, check out at yawn.
And the title? Truth in advertising, at least. You will be in a dark place—specifically, your living room, wondering why the scariest thing in the movie was the buffering icon.
