In a tonal departure from his absurdist-satiric recent work, director adaptor Richard Hilliar (Apocka-wocka-lockalypse and U.B.U.: A Cautionary tale of Catastrophe) delivers a straight-up gothic chiller based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.

Lucy Lock in The Turn of the Screw. Photo © Phil Erbacher

Published in 1898, the novella tells the tale of a governess hired to mind two children living in a rambling country mansion. It has been already adapted many times: into an opera by Benjamin Britten; into a TV series (The Turning), and into several films, most memorably in 1961 as The Innocents.

The book’s genius lies in its ambiguity. James allows his readers space to reach different conclusions. One might, for example, take it that the children are – as the governess comes to suspect – possessed by the malevolent ghosts of the previous governess and her lover, a degenerate gardener named Quint.

Another reader might arrive at the conclusion that the awful visions experienced in the story are the governess’s alone, projections of her own trauma and fear.

More than a century after it was written, we can also read into the story another possibility,...