 Critics disagreed about how successful the film was in capturing the novel's ambiguity, which is part of the enduring appeal of James's story. For Tim Dowling, a columnist for The Guardian, the film failed in this regard. The novella, Dowling explained, can be understood as a straightforward ghost story, but it can also be understood as a story about Ann's madness, and there is further ambiguity concerning whether the children are being controlled by Quint and Jessel, or whether the children are controlling Ann. He suggested that "there's probably a subtlety to all this ambiguity on the page which, when translated to the screen, just looks like having it both ways." As a result, "the narrative was at times more evasive than ambiguous". Whittaker felt that the film failed to appropriately present the novella's ambiguity and implicit themes, saying that the adaptation "feels oddly obligated to fill in all those blanks, and it's really the script's fault". Sutcliffe expressed a similar view; for example, he noted that "when the governess sees Quint on the tower for the first time so do we, and the thing that really haunts us as we read the story — uncertainty — vanishes to be replaced by a much duller kind of fretfulness, about when something is next going to pop out at us." By contrast, Chater and Teeman (both writing for The Times) felt the ambiguity of the film was praiseworthy, with Chater asking whether the ghosts truly exist or are just a manifestation of "hysterical imagination", and Teeman suggesting that viewers will be more likely to believe (with Dr Fisher) that Ann's retelling is accurate. The Scotsman's Whitelaw praised Welch's ability to balance the various subtexts of the film while still delivering an effective narrative.
