“Have you ever been a live-in governess?” asks Mrs. Grose (Barbara Marten), the stern-faced housekeeper of an eerily empty mansion.

“No, not since the 1800s,” replies Kate (Mackenzie Davis), the teacher who has agreed to tutor the orphaned 7-year-old girl, Flora (Brooklynn Prince), who lives there.

Credit to the makers of “The Turning” for putting an excuse up front for any anachronisms instead of going to ludicrous lengths to modernize Henry James’s 1898 novella “The Turn of the Screw,” which in this loose riff, courtesy of the veteran music video director Floria Sigismondi, has been updated to 1994. (When Kate is introduced, Kurt Cobain’s death is in the news.)