Toward the end of Netflix's The Haunting of Bly Manor, someone observes the tale that unfolds over the course of the nine episodes isn't a ghost story but, rather, a love story, and she's mostly right. Oh, there are ghosts, as anyone who's seen the trailer can attest, but it's not really about them. It's about love, memory, and the kind of heart-rending, bone-aching loss that feels too much to bear.
Loosely based on Henry James' 1898 Gothic horror novella The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting of Bly Manor is Mike Flanagan's followup to The Haunting of Hill House (itself a retelling of Shirley Jackson's novel of the same name). But while that 2018 series was celebrated for its family dysfunction, jump scares and excruciating tension, Bly Manor is something different; something better. It just requires patience, and perhaps a second viewing, for the audience to fully appreciate.
Given the sheer number of adaptations of The Turn of the Screw, the premise is familiar, at least in the broadest of strokes. Flanagan moves the events to 1987, but the basic details otherwise remain the same: London businessman Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) hires a troubled American teacher, Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti), to play au pair to his orphaned niece and nephew at the family's country estate, Bly Manor. Eager to escape a trauma from her own past, Dani willfully ignores the warning signs, from heavy-drinking Henry's disinterest in the children's welfare to the murky circumstances behind the boy's expulsion from boarding school, and happily accepts the job.
Imposing Bly Manor is precisely as one expects, with a sprawling house, a family chapel and cemetery, a long history, and an unmistakable sense of dread. And while the children aren't exactly the stock characters that typically populate such stories, they're undeniably ... off. Young Flora (Amelie Bea Smith) is as sweet as an au pair could hope for -- her repeated decrees of "perfectly splendid" could form the basis for an ill-advised drinking game -- at least until she issues stern warnings about her dolls, or walking around the house after bedtime. Precocious Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), the elder of the two, oscillates between world-weary and subtly menacing. They're offset by a domestic staff that defies the conventions of the genre: Hannah Grace (T'Nia Miller), the alternately warm and fierce housekeeper who's as protective of the manor as she is its occupants; Owen (Rahul Kohli), the pun-loving cook who moved back home from Paris to care for his ailing mother; and Jamie (Amelia Eve), the rough-around-the-edges gardener.
But before Dani can even unpack, she's drawn into the mysteries, of her new home, and of her new friends and charges, each of whom is burdened, and shaped, by loss -- whether of loved ones or of self. Whereas Hill House maintained a steady drumbeat of scares, embodied by terrors like the Bent-Neck Lady, Bly Manor is far more reserved, parceling out its apparitions early on, in flashes in mirrors and windows, before then throwing open the doors.
That's because visceral scares aren't the goal of creator Mike Flanagan, who's proved time and again he's adept at that, in works such as Oculus, Before I Wake and The Haunting of Hill House. Instead, The Haunting of Bly Manor unspools slowly, weaving together a remarkably effective, and affecting, meditation on grief, trauma and, yes, love. The series explores multiple facets of memories, as welcome refuge from an unpleasant present, as the fading tributes to those we've lost, and as their own kinds of haunting. That frequently plays out in a repetition that's initially comforting, but then, as the memories fold back onto themselves, musters little more than confusion and, ultimately, dread.
Although The Haunting of Bly Manor has all of the trappings of a traditional horror series, it's anything but traditional. Viewers bracing for the next jump scare, or else playing "count the ghosts," will likely come away a little disappointed. Here, it's the scenes between the expected frights that pay off.
There are moments in Bly Manor so emotionally devastating, in which characters reveal the bottomless depths of their heartache, that viewers may find themselves tearing up ... yes, while watching what's nominally a supernatural horror drama.
Arriving Friday on Netflix, The Haunting of Bly Manor stars Victoria Pedretti, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Amelia Eve, T'Nia Miller, Rahul Kohli, Tahirah Sharif, Amelie Bea Smith, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth and Henry Thomas, with Kate Siegel, Katie Parker, Alex Essoe and Matthew Holness.