The Innocents (1961) & A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

The Innocents (1961) Directed by Jack Clayton Rating: 8/10

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) Directed by Jee-woon Kim Rating: 6.5/10

Review: Two problematic children in two psychological horror films spanning forty years and cultures a world apart. Also, an 8/10 and 6.5/10, respectively.

Analysis:
If you ever encounter two young siblings in England or South Korea, at some isolated house with an unknown history, skittish family, and lots of dark spaces, you had best move on quickly. These films follow the creepy children paradigm, grappling with themes of innocence, madness, and of course, ghosts. The Innocents, draws from about as classic a form as possible for the genre, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, itself a take on Victorian ghost stories. Jack Clayton’s film, adapted by Truman Capote, follows James’ text fairly closely, though it drops the framed structure of the novella.

The film begins with Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) in the midst of her interview to be governess of a country estate, Bly, a post which entails caring for the young niece and nephew of wealthy bachelor. She enthusiastically accepts, undeterred by the man’s apparent lack of concern for his orphan wards or the sudden demise of their last governess. So Giddens hits the road and the mansion’s lush environs make her so giddy that she even finds little, aptly named Flora, equally enchanting.

Flora (Pamela Franklin) behaves friendly enough, though given to wandering around the estate’s grounds unchaperoned and a tendency to answer questions with silence and a steely-eyed stare. But she’s happy to have a new friend, plays happily with Giddens and the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, and soon predicts the return of her brother, Miles, despite his recent departure to boarding school. Sure enough, a letter arrives informing the adults of Miles expulsion from school, though it omits specifics and only alludes to his corrupting ‘influence’ over other students. With this fine introduction, the little boy prances home.

Giddens embraces both these children with a ferver that highlights just how forgiving she’s willing to be for their quirks, for these children are strange. Their behavior alternates between what you’d expect from a child only as tall as your waist–playful, mischievous, and sweet–to that of a worldly, sneering adult whose games with Giddens mock and abuse her. Giddens starts to see mysterious figures around the grounds–a face at a window, a silhouette in the distance–and the children grow quiet, evasive, and irritable when she investigates in their presence.

Mrs. Grose, our reliable tether to the reality in this mansion of eerie children and their anxious governess, provides some context after Giddens’ describes the mysterious man she saw. Grose identifies the man as Quint, the uncle’s old valet, who recently died after a slip on some icy steps. With his boss forever away, Quint ruled the manor, took little Miles under his wing, and cavorted with abandon, and the former governess, too. This woman, a Miss Jessel, thought him charming, and Mrs. Grose implies that the governess and valet would have liaisons without restraint, in perverse fashion, and in plan view of the children. After Quint’s deadly drunken stumble, Miss Jessel, goes down to the pond and pulls an Ophelia.

James makes clever use of the allusive action, and Clayton does not miss the opening. Humid nature suffuses shots, full of ferns, lilies, willows and marsh and Giddens rejoices, until something strange catches her eye. The camera shows us close-ups of decay: insects feeding and dead critters in the full glare of the sun. (Flora, at least in Giddens’ eyes, similarly vacillates between beautiful, natural innocence and silent evil.) The mansion’s interiors feature similar juxtapositions: cavernous elegance with shadows and hidden spaces always at the edge of vision. In addition to these curtains and corners, Clayton prominently uses shots of total darkness except for singular characters and objects, heightening the effect of psychological isolation, suspense, and fragility. The ambient sounds, which might sound ridiculously overdone to the modern ear, work in context–something constantly lurks, but juxtaposed with the isolated vision of Miss Giddens, one cannot know if horror waits outside her vision or within her mind.

Giddens has her narrative now: The ghosts of Quint and Jessel haunt the grounds, they possess the innocent children, and she has to save them. Relations between Giddens and the children deteriorate, as she and Miles have bizarre, adult conversations edging on the inappropriate and share a very inappropriate kiss, and when Giddens drives Flora to hysterics with her questions. Grose takes Flora away, at Giddens request, and the governess has her confrontation with Miles, convinced that should he speak the name of his tormenter (yes, another indirect Shakespeare allusion), he should be freed from the pernicious ghost. He evades, Giddens pushes, she sees the ghost, Miles runs to the garden, and just as she forces him to say Quint’s name, with the ghost ever reaching behind him, the boy dies.

So James and Clayton leave us a riddle with two plausible solutions: the supernatural and the psychological. The former: Two servants who began corrupting the children in their wanton lives continue after death, and their ghosts infect everything and everyone on the estate; Giddens forces Miles to confront his possessor, but his freedom costs his life. The latter: A vulnerable, impressionable young woman takes on a post, and the dark history of the estate and its neglected, strange children shakes her rattled mind; Giddens inflicts her madness upon the others, causing Flora’s hysterics and Miles’ panicked death.

The allusion to mad Ophelia begins as an unnerving remark upon Jessel’s obsession, but also shifts as a potential comment on Giddens’ sanity. She transforms from the clever, noble Jane Eyre to Bertha, a crazed and lonely menace locked in a mansion. The devices used to hint at horror on the periphery become signs of Giddens’ foggy, paranoid mind. Every repressed thought and feeling–lust, anger, recklessness–she keeps in the dark periphery and sublimates into action towards the children, hence that creepy kiss she plants on Miles. The children’s acting, meanwhile, plays just ambiguously enough to be strange but not implausible. Would anyone expect a child to want to talk about the violent deaths of their beloved caretakers, much less the possible, and maybe fictional trauma inflicted on them by these same trusted caretakers? And this doesn’t even begin to touch all those Victorian issues of propriety, the same things which may or may not be helping to cramp poor Miss Giddens’ sanity.

But we cannot know because of the greatest trick James and Clayton employ, omission. They use our imaginations against us, as the story does against Giddens. Mrs. Grose tells of tale of implication but withholds anything explicit and seems to hold even more back. The children almost seem to disturb her, as they do Giddens, but she maintains her love for them and remains willfully silent. She watches Giddens from afar, as we do, but she refuses to give even that her judgement. In his letter, the headmaster leaves out just why he expels Miles, besides some ‘corrupting influence.’ In many ways, we have no idea what has happened at Bly Manor, and even what happens remains unknown, as everything we see becomes potentially skewed by the vision of our unreliable protagonist. Doubt assumes the role of haunting spectre, shifting at the edge of our vision, and the camera posits us from Giddens’ doubt-ridden mind. The result is genuinely unnerving. As in Kubrick’s The Shining, it functions through a perspective of perpetual strangeness, a labyrinth of contradictory spaces and shadows, and a madness simultaneously interior and exterior. The storytellers leave enough holes to play upon the audience the real innocents of this spectacle, and with these omissions tell a compelling story that works itself out neatly, either interpretation.

But whether concerning ghosts real or imagined, The Innocents is about the horrors of trauma, and the ways it lurks within those who have suffered it and within those who have not. The value and nature of innocence itself comes entirely into question. These children began to lose their innocence long before Giddens’ arrival (they are orphans, after all), but whether this process was due to something unnatural and evil–rather than simply unfortunate and tragic–remains unknown. Giddens’ good intentions rupture whatever peace these children had; innocence could be the chink in her mind’s defenses through which madness invades. Clayton and Capote do well to stick to James’ carefully constructed text, which only ever reveals just enough to cast doubt. But cooly, quietly, the film won’t answer your questions.

Kim Ji-woon, in A Tale of Two Sisters, tries many of the same tricks in a modern form, but seeks to resolve itself more obsessively, resulting in what feels like a mash-up of The Innocents and The Grudge. It opens with a teenage girl in a mental institution, until Two sisters arrive at an isolated home in the country (where else), where their father and stepmother await. The lonely house is creepy enough, the countryside beautiful but desolate, and sure enough, tensions run high in this family unit over something nobody will talk about. In fact, one sister, the younger, more innocent (yup) Su-yeon, won’t talk at all, though her older sibling, Su-mi, defends and comforts her. Sister/stepmother relations proceed in strained, antagonistic fashion, if not quite levels of fairy tale nemeses yet.

But Su-mi wakes up one morning to find a girl–a hideously crippled girl whose face is obscured by hair and shadow–crawling at the edge of her bed and then walking right up on her mattress, only to vanish. She gets her period. Her stepmother, Eun-joo, with whom relations are worsening, can only offer bemused sarcasm to this fact, and her father, seeming stressed beyond all measure and avoiding both his daughter and wife, sleeps on the couch. At a dinner party (to which the sisters are not invited), Eun-joo tells a story mid-hysterics and the guests look on in awkward horror. They do not remember whatever anecdote she tells, and tell her so. But this awkward moment gives way to more visceral horror, when one guest begins to violently convulse on the floor. Towards the end of her seizure she has a vision of a bent and broken child beneath the kitchen sink, and she tells her husband on the way home. Cleaning up, Eun-joo senses something beneath the sink, and when she reaches for a fallen broach, a filthy hand reaches out from the darkness. She tries to tell her husband, Moo-hyeon, but he shows only exasperation.

Relations deteriorate. We get hints about an ominous, hulking wardrobe that everyone fears. The sisters look over pictures of their dead mother, and Eun-joo finds photos of herself torn up and scratched over. In one particularly painful moment, Eun-joo locks Su-yeon within the wardrobe and lets her lie there, screaming. [Spoilers coming…albeit obvious one] Finally, Moo-hyeon confronts Su-mi, and tells her that Su-yeon is dead, and she needs to accept it. He makes a mysterious phone call for someone to come help, and departs in the morning to pick this person up. Su-mi wakes to find a bloody sack in broad daylight, but as she goes to open it, and free what she presumes to be Su-yeon’s corpse, Eun-joo appears, bloody and angry, and the two attack each other until Eun-joo stands, crazed and victorious, with a heavy statue poised to crush the life out of Su-mi. At this moment, Moo-hyeon walks in, and sees only shards of statuary around Su-mi’s injured body.

With her madness finally made explicit, the ghost story becomes more of a psychological mystery: What trauma caused Su-mi’s interior to rift so violently that she not only sees her dead sister everywhere, but imagines herself as daughter and stepmother both?

Ji-woon first gives us the film’s most blatant ambiguity. We see the real Eun-joo alone in the dark house, in which she hears a rumble from above. She investigates, and in the barren, desaturated room, all the doors lock. The wardrobe opens, and a woman, moving in broken and unnatural spasms, crawls out from within. From a shot outside the house, screams are heard.

And then a cut to Su-mi awaking in a hospital bed, obscuring the reality of the episode. We do not learn whether it was supernatural justice or a fantasy of revenge. More troubling, however, is the guest’s vision of a girl under the sink. Su-mi’s madness is one thing, and works fine in context of that scene and its aftermath, but for the guest to see exactly Su-mi’s vision of a ghost is a glaring flaw in the psychological explanation the film touts as its explaining twist. But the real apex (and emotional nadir) of the film comes only at the end, with a flashback.

Eun-joo worked at a hospital during the stay of the girls’ mother, who seems both ill and depressed at this time. Some of this may be due to her husband’s blatant affair with Eun-joo, which does not escape her or the girls’ attention. They go home, along with Eun-joo as nurse, and while she and Su-mi but heads, Su-hyeon runs upstairs to let loose about the awful conditions of her family. She weeps, and her mother comes to comfort her till she falls asleep. She awakes alone and sees her wardrobe door swing partially open. She opens the other door to find her mother hanged herself within. Su-hyeon grabs her mother’s clothes in horror, tugging the body too much, and the wardrobe comes crashing down atop her, pinning the girl’s body to the ground. In a long panning shot, sister, father, and Eun-joo pause and hear the sound of a crash. Only Eun-joo inspects, and she sees the fallen wardrobe and hears the clawing and whimpers within. Terrified, Eun-joo makes the frightening decision to walk away, but pauses on the steps, and returns. She meets oblivious Su-mi on the way, and the teenager tells Eun-joo to get the hell out, in so many words. Eun-joo replies with a threat, “Be careful, you might regret this.” Su-mi ignores it, and Eun-joo turns around, letting Su-yeon die beneath in a broken mess, clawing with her nails and ignored by all.

This final flashback gets to the heart of the film, and makes everything that preceded it feel a bit overdone for the sake of horror and suspense in the conventional, commercial mode. It’s necessary to see the extent of Su-mi’s madness–the extreme damage wrought by trauma and the inability to cope with it alone or with family–but the sacrifices made for a quick scare are too great, and the plotting could have been made more meticulous, rather than stretch out episodes that are not so ambiguous (Su-mi’s final schizoid fight, for instance). But the flashback presents us with an elegant and truly horrifying parable, after which questions of guilt and evil abound. Eun-joo stands markedly as the axis upon which the worst of humanity tilts downwards, but all are complicit, save Su-yeon. Moo-hyeon has clearly never been enough of a presence, despite his good intentions, their mother commits suicide in her daughter’s closet, about as wretched a choice as possible, no matter how crushing her pain and ignorance of the future. Su-mi wallows in angst, and Eun-joo vacillates whichever way the wind pushes her; she tries to wipe her hands of it via Su-mi’s retort, but Su-yeon’s blood clearly stains her most. There is enough ambiguity in the intention, action, and neglect of all these characters to conjure a powerful sequence that the rest of the film lacks.

The cinematography here evokes both the suspense and inevitability of this moment, like watching dominoes fall. The afternoon lighting stillness and terror; it is the instant before darkness falls, peaceful and old, and it is the instant in which innocence is shattered. The moment is hopeless, and we are trapped watching it, but it is also moving.

HG – 8/24/2012