The Haunting of Bly Manor

Bly Manor might not be scary but it certainly sticks in your brain long after it’s over, because stories—like houses, like people—don’t have to horrify to be haunting.

The nice thing is it pretty much works. Oh, there’s a great deal of silliness and some false notes — it is a ghost story, after all and some explanations add up while others just drift away. But in the end “Bly Manor” dares to make at least some sense (which is likely blasphemy to Henry James fanatics).

“The Haunting of Bly Manor” feels like a natural follow-up to “Hill House” in the sense that it’s from a creator who has used the success of the first project to make something that’s intrinsically less eager to please, but that also makes it less thrilling. The immediate stakes of the first project are gone, but they’re replaced by something that’s still valuable and arguably more haunting.

Some pointed and strategic tonal shifts throughout the series’ nine episodes also help keep the pace from flagging, though I’d argue that nine episodes was a few too many. Conversely, given proper attention, the series’ climax could have been significantly expanded and dramatized.

While Hill House excelled in its early, grounded episodes before devolving into chaos at the end, Bly Manor only gets going in a second half that, despite some distractingly soapy twists, thrives on productive confusion. And it offers a more satisfying conclusion than the first season.

The Haunting Of Bly Manor is entertaining to watch even during the times it’s not trying to scare the audience, and that’s something that not many horror series can do.

This Haunting is often a blast, even if I wish the storyteller (whose identity is a spoiler) had sustained a bit more mystery. [12 - 25 Oct 2020, p.8]

Once the circle completes itself, the whole thing feels richer than it sometimes does in parts, even if Flanagan, like our narrator, easily could have told this story in a more compact form.

The Haunting of Bly Manor is an entertaining and evocative followup to Hill House, despite never quite reaching the heights of its predecessor.

“Bly Manor” stands as an ambitious blend of genres and arrives at its ultimate point with proper gravity. It’s not a great ghost story, it’s not a great love story, but it’s still haunting enough to hear out.

The series attempts to link [the characters'] disparate dramas together as it builds, but gets awfully soapy in the process. Bly Manor plods along through its nine episodes, trying to find the reason for this grand convergence. It gets there eventually, but only after sifting through a lot of clutter.

So much of what works in this series is because of the sort of heart and strong emotional beats seen in Hannah’s story. But without a precise handling of plotting and a more daring approach to horror, those more intriguing emotional beats falter and fade away. For all its heart, Bly Manor lacks the bravura necessary to work as the love story wrapped in a ghostly tale that it is aching to be.

Flanagan has taken one of the most elegantly simple and enigmatic of novellas and found a way to over-explain everything from plot mechanics to theme, producing a nine-episode season that's sensuous, spooky and evasive one moment and cumbersomely obvious the next. You may want to wallow in this evocative world, but probably not as much as Flanagan does, which ends up being a real problem for long stretches.

If “Hill House” provided a blueprint in how to tell a long, heartbreaking, and actually scary story, the failures and indulgences of “Bly Manor” are unfortunate examples in how not to.

[The Haunting of Bly Manor] shares with its predecessor a sensibility, a high-flying literary inspiration (the work of Henry James this time), a crisp and pristine visual aesthetic and some cast members, never takes flight in the way genre devotees might expect. For one thing, it’s too rarely really scary; for another, more important one, it gets confounded by its own story

If all you’re up for is a relatively plotless bit of atmospherics, enjoy your time at Bly Manor. Fans of Hill House will have to hope for a return to spooky form next time.