A great actor whose name I am not supposed to mention here narrates much of the new Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor (out October 9). In 2007, her character tells a wedding party a chilling, sad story of 1987 (and years previous) England, when a spooky estate’s resident ghosts tangled fitfully with living people, all caught in the grip of personal loss. This American actor tries her noble best to maneuver a Northern English accent, though it gets a bit wobbly as her narration scrapes the ceiling of profundity but never quite breaks through.
The voiceover, with its heavy writing and uneven if committed delivery, is pretty neatly representative of the whole of Bly Manor, which aims for something scary and sweeping but is too often hampered by messy adornment. Bly Manor is the second series in the Haunting franchise that began with 2018’s Hill House, an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel led by horror auteur Mike Flannigan. He lends his imprimatur to Bly Manor—loosely adapted from The Turn of the Screw and another Henry James work—but his authorship is less present throughout this new series, which suffers from the loss of that singular vision. (Check out Flannigan’s excellent, under-sung Stephen King adaptation Doctor Sleep to see him working in full bloom.) Much of Bly Manor plays as pastiche rather than continuation, a disappointment coming after Hill House’s resonant run of episodes.
What worked so well about Hill House is that it concerned one family, all reeling in the decades after an original trauma. Flannigan effectively introduced literal ghosts to the more metaphorical trappings of a grief drama, literalizing the family’s lingering, compounded pain in the form of the supernatural. Lugubrious as Hill House could be, its sentiment—so laden with weary regret, an anger and sadness over lives’ strangled potential—was hard to shake. It felt primal, urgent; the show’s rich keening came from the innermost parts of its characters, those voices blending richly with all the ghostly moan.
There is a family at the center of Bly Manor, but there are also a bunch of other unrelated characters who arrive at the titular country mansion from their own troubled trajectories. The series attempts to link their disparate dramas together as it builds, but gets awfully soapy in the process. Bly Manor plods along through its nine episodes, trying to find the reason for this grand convergence. It gets there eventually, but only after sifting through a lot of clutter.
Victoria Pedretti, who played ruined sister Nell in Hill House, takes the lead for Bly Manor. She’s Dani, an American au pair whose reasons for being in England are, at first, suspiciously murky. She quickly accepts a job tutoring two orphaned children (a gig proffered by the kids’ uncle, a sozzled lawyer played by Hill House vet Henry Thomas) out in the sticks, moving into the looming old house and finding herself near immediately plagued by mysterious happenings in the night. The housekeeper, Hannah (T’Nia Miller), is friendly enough, as is the family’s driver and chef, Owen (Rahul Kohli). A gardener, Jamie (Amelia Eve), is a bit less so, but for the most part Dani seems in safe company. The children who are to become Dani’s charges, perspicacious young Flora (Amelie Bea Smith) and boarding school exile Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), have a bit of the creepy movie-kid thing going on—what with Flora’s spooky doll house and Miles’s vacant, vaguely wicked stare—but Dani still relishes the chance to teach on a small scale, in a rambling home far from her own.
It’s a familiar setup, both because Turn of the Screw is a classic of the haunted-house form (and, in fact, helped create our modern conception of it) and more immediately because the mournful, shadowy timbre of the series is so similar to that of Hill House. Where Bly Manor tries to distinguish itself is in its thematic focus. Gone, essentially, are Turn of the Screw’s somewhat disputed allusions to child molestation, replaced by a more warmed-over meditation on doomed love. The series centralizes two romances as they struggle to survive under the pall of Bly Manor’s gloom. One of those love stories, the nature of which I won’t spoil here, really lands by the end; the closing minutes of the finale are genuinely moving, depicting the kind of hope against reason that animates so much human passion for another person.
That’s less true of the other romance. Like too much else in Bly Manor, it gets bogged down in the story’s dense swamp. Bly Manor is so erratically structured that the penultimate episode has to pause the main action and devote itself entirely to explaining something fundamental to our understanding of this universe’s internal logic. That the show was structured to have such a long and uncompelling exposition dump so late in the game is baffling, and will prove frustrating to fans of Hill House’s more thoughtfully meted-out reveals. (That series dealt in a lot of late-stage explanation too, but not to this extent.) What’s worse is that the big unveiling of Bly Manor’s inner-workings seems wholly untethered to the characters we’ve been watching for seven alternately slow and frightening hours. It’s terribly unsatisfying.