Except, none of the five financially privileged students-yes, there are only five of them-abandoned at the mysterious mansion by their families (including Kit, a barely moderate piano player), seem particularly gifted in any subject.īut then again, perhaps they are. The headmistress, who carries faint echoes of Warden Norton (of “ The Shawshank Redemption”) and Reverend Mother (of “ Novitiate”), calls Blackwood “an alternative to prison,” where problematic girls like Kit would somehow achieve greatness in what she considers the four main pillars of knowledge: mathematics, literature, art and music.
Her feeble appeal falls on the deaf ears of her desperate parents and unimpressed educators-soon, Kit finds herself at the alarming gates of the vast and eerie Blackwood Boarding School, run by the peculiar Madame Duret (Thurman). We meet Kit on the heels of an arson attempt while she recites an unconvincing apology to her school’s principle figures on how she’s learned a valuable lesson from her misbehavior. This oversight is even the case for the film’s main protagonist Kit Gordy ( AnnaSophia Robb, of “ The Way, Way Back”), a challenging young woman with a fiery temper and a long history of academic suspensions. While this is also technically true for “Down A Dark Hall,” its script (co-written by Michael Goldbach and Chris Sparling) limits the film’s talented ensemble of players by neglecting to build them out as full-fledged characters we can slowly get to know and care about.
And yet, the aforementioned shortcomings are hardly the fault of YA, a genre that is often (wrongly) dismissed as slight and lowbrow but continues to give young female actors the rare gift of meaty parts.
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