Netflix's follow-up to The Haunting Of Hill House arrives this week.
Considering the title alone, you wouldn't think that by the end of this series that you would have cried in sadness more times than you jumped in fright, but that is exactly what had happened by the time The Haunting Of Bly Manor came to an end.
The creative team behind Netflix's hit horror show The Haunting Of Hill House reunited with the cast of the show to tell this unrelated ghost story, loosely based on the 1898 horror novella The Turning Of The Screw, here updated to the 1980s: an American au pair (Victoria Pedretti) is hired to mind two young children in a huge country estate home after both their parents died, as did the previous au pair.
The estate comes with a cook (Rahul Kohli), cleaner (T'Nia Miller), and gardener (Amelia Eve), all of whom are perfectly lovely, but the young kids soon begin to act very oddly, while the au pair is sure she's seeing people in the house that don't belong there...
Initially, the first few episodes do have the mystery and the scares cranked up relatively high, if never quite matching the scare intensity of Hill House, but they don't stay that way for very long. It turns out that each of our main characters are tormented in some way by something in their personal lives - practically all of them dealing with unrequited love or illicit relationships - and the house merely brings those torments to the forefront via its own special brand of haunting.
The further into the season we get, and the more the mysteries are unravelled, the less scary the show becomes, as it focuses instead of the psychological turmoil everyone is wading through, and the highly emotional pay-off they all result in. How it gets there is never less than interesting, as the storytelling begins to mess with the characters' (and our) perception of memory and time, in a very Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind kind of way.
While nothing comes close to the jaw-dropping "single-take" episode from Hill House, it is still a lavish production, the story jumping between decades and continents, with the actors mostly nailing the cut-glass posh accents (or in Oliver Jackson-Cohen's case, a spot on James McAvoy impression), all the while managing to keep the several mysteries going at once, and as we mentioned above, some plot threads resulting in some genuinely tearful moments.
The rub is that it just isn't terribly scary. A handful jump-scares near the start are not indicative of what is to come later on, with the horror becoming more of a supernatural drama. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but anyone hoping to get their scare-fix here will come away disappointed.
All nine episodes of The Haunting of Bly Manor will be available on Netflix from Friday, October 9. Check out the trailer for the show right here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tykS7QfTWMQ
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