This mini-series by up and coming horror auteur Mike Flanagan (Best known for his previous work on The Haunting of Hill House & Doctor Sleep). The Haunting of Bly Manor is, at first glance, a modern retelling of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James a deviously ambiguous gothic horror novel that will leave you with more questions than answers by the end. Bly Manor is not that at all, and while it follows the rough plot of the novel it has entirely different intentions and ultimately does a damn good job of accomplishing what it sets out to do.
First, let’s be clear about what The Haunting of Bly Manor is, and what it is not. It is a character driven romantic drama with definite nods to gothic romance and horror. It is not strictly speaking, a horror series, the ultimate goal of the series is not simply to frighten the viewer, though that it certainly doesn't shy away from doing so on a few occasions. The Haunting of Bly Manor is first and foremost concerned with its characters and its themes. The framing device used in the first episode deliberately obfuscates this reality by presenting the events first as a ghost story and then playing into a number of well-known horror tropes in the early episodes.
This is not to say the show isn’t scary, it is pervasively creepy and occasionally terrifying but always in service to the characters and the themes, not simply to spook the audience. The show melds the personal trauma of its characters with legitimately supernatural elements in a nod to the book whose delighted in never clarifying which was which. Here, it’s definitely clearer what is what, especially as all the pieces are fit together towards the end.
The series wisely adds more characters than the book had and manages to do a solid job of fleshing most of them out and making us care about them. The series doesn’t really have a singular villain, but rather several broken individuals that are given the same humanization as the rest of the cast.
Like much of Flanagan’s work, The Haunting of Bly Manor uses the language of horror to wrestle with the traumas of life and explores the struggle of overcoming of those traumas. It may feel rather cliché for his answer to be love, but I think the series does a good job of not allowing that solution to feel nearly so cut and dry, love takes work, and the series takes plenty of time in its nine hours to demonstrate that, love is not a warm blanket to wrap yourself in and call it good, love is another human being, and they get cold too.
On top of the layered storytelling approach is a production that does a great job of not looking like your standard cable tv show. Any still from The Haunting of Bly Manor could easily be from a modern film production, no cheap looking sets, no bog standard lighting, no off the rack costumes here.
The tone and style of the shots match pretty closely with Flanagan’s previous work on The Haunting of Hill House another beautifully dark and moody show at night with surprisingly colorful compositions during the day that still manage to stay rooted in the horror aesthetic.
The only element that felt somewhat stale was a bit of rigidity with the camera work, there’s mostly static shots for the first half and then we get a bit more movement in the later episodes but nothing too crazy. More of this movement could’ve helped break up the slight monotony of the earlier episode's composition.
But a show is nothing without good characters and these are no exception. The regulars are almost universally likeable or at the very least relatable, and eschew many of the eye roll inducing tropes of the genre. The character's feel three dimensional thanks to good writing that effortlessly deepens their characterization and interpersonal relationships throughout, helped along in no small part by excellent performances from a cast many of whom return from The Haunting of Hill House. I had a few hang-up's about Benjamin Evan Ainsworth who plays Miles, his performance is a bit stiff but hardly unbearable, the other child actor Amelie Bea Smith, who plays Flora, does a great job.
Overall, I found the show to be delightfully unsettling if rarely outright terrifying, deeply moving, and totally worth nine hours of my time.
8/10 This is what happens when you don't talk about your feelings.