When Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) begins a new job as an au pair at Bly Manor, she knows that it won’t be easy looking after orphaned twins Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Flora (Amelie Bea Smith). Thankfully, she’s not the lone adult in the story, working alongside housekeeper Hannah Grose (T’Nia Miller), chef Owen (Rahul Kohli) and gardener Jamie (Amelia Eve). They all try to offer as much of a semblance of normality as is possible to give wealthy, parentless children on a magnificent estate in the countryside. However, what Dani does not know is that her mysterious past will follow her there, and the Manor’s previous troubles will soon be keeping her up at night.
The Haunting of Bly Manor (Mike Flanagan, 2020) was one of my most anticipated shows of the year. I was incredibly disappointed by it. Yet, I also found it to be a sensitive and heartfelt watch that not only moved me profoundly, but also gripped me for the majority of its running time. Two contradictory statements, but both true nonetheless.
Bly Manor is the second series in Netflix and Mike Flanagan’s Haunting anthology, that has so far adapted Shirley Jackson with The Haunting of Hill House (Mike Flanagan, 2018) and now turns to Henry James’ 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw. As a fan of Jackson’s original text, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed such a loose adaptation, but this is mostly because of the brave decision from the beginning to only allude to the source material, instead adapting its content into a completely new story. Bly Manor is certainly still a loose adaptation of its source, but it uses far more of the story from the original text than Hill House ever did, including the typically Gothic framed narrative. The overall template of the show sticks to the novella’s story-within-a-story about a young woman sent to look after orphaned children at Bly Manor, haunted by the ghosts that surround them, but the series changes a lot from the original, including the race, gender and sexuality of key characters. It also looks beyond The Turn of the Screw, drawing from some of James’s other stories, such as 1868’s ‘The Romance of Certain Old Clothes’ and 1908’s ‘The Jolly Corner’, and even affectionately winks toward the excellent film adaptation, The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) with some neat references. The main distinction between the two Haunting shows, however, is that Hill House is genuinely very frightening: the most effective example of horror television that I’ve ever seen in terms of its delivery of actual scares. Conversely, Bly Manor is not even alarming.
This is what frustrated me so much about Bly Manor in the first few episodes. It is no spoiler to inform you that the show is a ghost story. So, where were the scares? Why was my heart not thumping through my ribcage with the intensity of the last five minutes before an essay submission that I’d just started that morning? Why did I not feel a chill shudder through me when I caught sight of a ghost in the background? There were some evocations of a fearful atmosphere that the show achieved, such as through the sound design of certain scenes that were almost entirely silent. These effectively reminded me of the sort of stressful nights when you think you’ve heard something in the house even though you’re alone, so you tiptoe around to try and find the source of your alarm. For a moment or two, there is an inkling of fear as you worry that you are, in fact, not alone. Then, you realise you left the window open and it was only one of your neighbours letting their dog out, and all that tension is diffused—as it was when I watched Bly Manor whenever these scenes ended.
Nonetheless, I am still adamant that The Haunting of Bly Manor is worth your time. It just isn’t a horror show, which is important to be aware of going in. With adjusted expectations, it is possible to avoid the disappointment I felt upon first viewing. A friend suggested to me that this issue of expectation was a failing of marketing rather than the show’s content. Whilst I do agree that there is an element of this, it did seem like the ghosts were attempts to incite fear in the earlier episodes, and in this respect, they failed. Instead of a fear-inducing mise-en-scène that led to a sense of dread, ghosts were just planted in front of you. As attempts to scare go, these felt forced. Yet, as the story develops, the presence of the ghosts ceases to feel like an evocation of horror. Instead, they feel more symbolic of the real heart of the story, which is a type of trauma that follows us wherever we go.
Instead of manifestations of fear, the ghosts of Bly Manor are representative of the cracks that grief leaves in our daily experience. Bolstered by the cast’s perfectly splendid performances (although grating at first, Miles and Flora grew on me exponentially), the shifting focus from character to character, the playful chronology and the intricate plotting, the show is an excellent example of television that satisfies your probing questions as the story progresses. A welcome change to being left in a pool of fatuous Tenet-esque (Christopher Nolan, 2020) ambiguity. It is refreshing to watch something that imaginatively develops and addresses narrative intricacies, creating a psychologically complex sketch of its characters’ lives. The apparitions are Bly Manor’s device for exploring its characters’ pasts, futures and presents, and regardless of whether they are scary or not, their unsettling presence is a reminder of what haunts people beyond the supernatural.
Unfortunately, some of the episodes just don’t work. The one dedicated to Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) provides some problematic background filler in attempt to imbue his questionable decisions later on in life with some sympathy, but ultimately ends up feeling more like emotional blackmail. Additionally, episode six felt like a crass retelling of the previous episode, and should probably have been left at the bottom of Bly pond if not for some strangely pleasant extra screen time for Garth Marenghi. Some of the accents are questionable (sorry, Kate Siegel. You are wonderful, but you cannot do an English accent) and took me out of the story, but that’s definitely because I’m English and will bristle at imitative vocal clunk. With a little more finesse, and some regional-appropriate casting (not necessarily English, but at least capable of playing English), The Haunting of Bly Manor could have been as spectacular as The Haunting of Hill House. Instead, it is a deeply moving Gothic romance that made me ache from the inside along with the characters, but it didn’t devastate me in the way it had the potential to.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is available to stream on Netflix.
