Review: The Haunting of Bly Manor Will Strike Terror In Your Hearts In Unexpected Ways

The Haunting of Bly Manor is finally out on Netflix and to tell the truth, one was not expecting this from the follow-up of The Haunting of Hill House. That is not to say that Bly Manor is bad, definitely not, but what is important in order to understand the complexities of this series is that we first stop comparing it to its predecessor. Because Bly Manor is anything but a sequel to Haunting Hill, in fact, the genres themselves differ a lot between the two. That’s right, if you were preparing yourself for jump-scares and electrifying chills of a horror flick, this series is not the right choice. Instead, Bly Manor pulls together the strings of horror and psychological thriller, mixes it with intricate metaphors and dense allegories, and serves you something akin to a gothic love story.

The series is created by Mike Flanagan who has now established himself in the film industry as quite the pro in making supernatural horrors. We see a few members from the cast of Haunting Hill returning, with Victoria Pedretti taking the centre stage. Actors including Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Amelia Eve, T'Nia Miller, Rahul Kohli, Tahirah Sharif, Amelie Bea Smith, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth and Henry Thomas are in pivotal roles. The musical score given by The Newton Brothers surprisingly adds to the magical/supernatural element of the show.

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The Plot

The story begins with Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti), a young American au pair, joining Bly manor as a governess to the two children Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Flora Wingrave (Amelie Bea Smith). It doesn’t take her long to realise that things are not what they seem in the manor: the kids she is looking after are terrifying for Flora has a whole collection of spooky dolls and Miles was recently kicked out of school for trying to murder a classmate. Plus, they seem to be talking to the dead and are also occasionally possessed by them. Then there is the housekeeper Hannah (T'Nia Miller) who keeps skipping meals and the house chef Owen (Rahul Kohli) who describes the manor as a “gravity well” that traps people.

On top of that, there’s a mystery surrounding the deaths of Mama and Papa Wingrave, as well as the previous governess (Tahirah Sharif) who drowned herself in the nearby lake. Between the kids, dolls, deaths and a haunted house, you’d sit comfortably in your couch thinking Bly Manor would be a sum of its horror tropes. Which is exactly where it stops being that: as the narrative moves ahead, the story keeps subverting all your expectations, until you eventually realise that the show is trying to be so much more than your average ghost story.

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So What Exactly Is The Show Trying To Be

Near the end of the series, after the narrator finishes with her story, one listener chimes in, “I liked your story. But I think you set it up wrong. You said it was a ghost story. It isn’t. It’s a love story.” The narrator retorts back that for her, they are the same thing. And perhaps that is where the answer regarding the show’s genre lies. The show leaves the style of focusing on one character’s backstory per episode, and instead uses monologues, a supernatural doppelgänger and mazes of memories to trace the hidden scars of each character. And that’s when you realise that every person living in the eponymous manor is separated from a loved one, whether through death, disease, or trauma. Each of these character's loss is also dealt with in a different way — faith, denial, or, in extreme cases, conversing with the dead.

And while there are enough scares (though only one true jump-scare), at its conclusion, Bly Manor is a love story. Although sometimes the love is twisted and unhealthy, sometimes it's familial, sometimes it's forbidden, but every story that the show tells is about love's stubborn way of sticking around. Instead of offering us more of the same form that we’ve seen before, Bly Manor ends up telling a different kind of ghost story. One where secrets are more important than scares. One which is haunting, but not necessarily horror.

This perhaps has also something to do with the classic Bly Manor loosely bases itself on, i.e. Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw. The premises of the two are somewhat identical, although in the later episodes Bly Manor goes ahead to establish its own flavour rather than becoming a faithful adaptation. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the shadow of one of the first authors to imbue the dark subtexts of the gothic novel with psychosexual terror and unreliable narration lurks all over this Mike Flanagan creation. Everything from the framing devices to the title of the episodes pays a homage James’s literary oeuvre. And as any James fan will tell you, ‘love’ and ‘romance’ in Henry James’s world has always had a very different connotation: they mean mystery and excitement, they hold deep-buried secrets, supernatural agony, and the feeling of encroaching doom.

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An Overall Stimulating Watch

Finishing the show does require patience. There are too many backstories to get through, and too many redundancies within them too. It also gets a bit confusing at times since the show keeps shifting between the real-world and memories. The pace is quite slow, although perhaps deliberately so. What makes one go through these sometimes-sluggish moments are the actors who have done an incredible job of making their characters both haunting and likeable. Even Bly Manor’s ghosts are relatable, and that’s saying something. The visuals are striking, and the grounds of the manor look straight out of a fairytale. The negative spaces of the screen are so interestingly filled with mirrors, curtains and doorways that it makes each frame look like a mystery waiting to be deciphered.

In one scene, Owen, the manor’s chef, makes a statement about how his mother, who’s suffering from dementia, has been gone for a long time. And that is the kind of places where most of the scares in Bly Manor lie. What is there to do when you know, in the end, you are going to be forgotten? Are ghosts even real, and/or malignant? Or is Dani, traumatised by her past, merely imagining the horror around her? And amongst the two, which exactly is more terrifying?

To be very honest, it's tricky to talk more about what happens in the show without citing examples from it, and in turn, risk uttering a spoiler. So, for now, let’s just say that if you are looking for something that can provide you with the intellectual stimulus to dissect, debate and discuss it after finishing, The Haunting of Bly Manor should be your go-to watch. It isn’t your average horror series. It's something you realise is not scary until it's two hours later when you're still contemplating your own mortality.

Picture Credit: Netflix Screen Grab

Views expressed are the author’s own.