Bly Me

Earlier this year, I wrote about the Netflix mini-series The Haunting of Hill House. I thoroughly enjoyed the horror-thriller, its gradually unfolding story, its creepy production values, and more. And I was excited to check out the newer mini-series made by most of the same people, The Haunting of Bly Manor.

As Hill House was a loose adaptation of Shirley Jackson, Bly Manor is (I hear) a loose adaptation of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. An au pair is hired to look after two young children at a manor in the English countryside. She's soon forced to deal not only with their own strange behavior, but odd goings-on at the house, the dark past of what happened to the au pair before her, and her own tragic history.

For me, Bly Manor is a notably weaker effort than Hill House -- though I've heard from some that it might come down to liking whichever one you see first. Though both mini-series use a similar format of focusing most episodes on one character and revealing their personal history in the context of the larger narrative, there was something about Bly Manor that struck me as a Lost knockoff where Hill House had felt more organic. Bly Manor seems more limited too; the shared trauma of the Hill House characters seemed to manifest in more varieties.

There's a fair bit more "smoke and mirrors" to The Haunting at Bly Manor. Many of the character back stories work as islands unto themselves, siloed episodes of "Black Mirror" depicting one horrific trauma -- but they don't always fit into the whole in a satisfying way. Plot threads "attach," but they aren't always "woven" together in a compelling way.

But there are good points about Bly Manor. It serves up plenty of good scares and many creative and evocative images of horror that stay with you. The cast is solid -- both the returning "alumni" of The Haunting of Hill House and the new additions. Particularly strong are the two children who figure prominently in the story. Creepy kids loom large in horror, though it's hard to find a good child actor. This show found two in Benjamin Evan Ainsworth and Amelie Bea Smith; the challenges they're thrown are considerable in this story, but they're both reliably great.

Also, though I said the various plot threads didn't all connect for me, I still enjoyed the ending of the 9-episode series. Though the series spends most of its run trying for thrills and chills, the final installment embraces the gothic side of "gothic horror," and is peculiarly sweet, even heart-warming. I liked the change of pace -- which, by the way, wasn't completely from nowhere, but gently teased throughout the run.

Still, The Haunting of Bly Manor didn't feel to me like the essential experience that The Haunting at Hill House was. I'd give it a C+ overall. It's hard for me to say that it's "only for Hill House fans," because maybe that theory is true about liking whichever one you watch first. But it's almost certainly only for fans of methodical, eerie horror.