SummarySet in 1980s New England, Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) hires a new American nanny (Victoria Pedretti) to look after his orphaned niece and nephew (Amelie Bea Smith, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) at Bly Manor after the death of their au pair in this gothic horror series created by Mike Flanagan.
SummarySet in 1980s New England, Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) hires a new American nanny (Victoria Pedretti) to look after his orphaned niece and nephew (Amelie Bea Smith, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) at Bly Manor after the death of their au pair in this gothic horror series created by Mike Flanagan.
Flanagan explores these relationships while delivering a powerful and poignant message about moving on in the face of grief. Bly Manor is not Hill House, but left to its own devices, this Haunting offers a beautiful examination of love and the ways we hold onto what we’ve lost.
“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.
This was a very different take on ghosts stories once again and it was executed very well. While sometimes it lagged in the story progression, it kept me very invested in the story and characters. The ghosts are not the same type of specters we have seen recycled again and again. Another reason this show stood out to me. Overall a very moving story and definitely worth watching.
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.
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.
[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.
This second entry in Mike Flanagan's The Haunting anthology series is a significant step back from what we got with Hill House. Stylistically it's a bit too British for its own good. The wide array of grating accents, the irritatingly proper way everybody speaks, and the ever present narrator designed to give the tale a more storybook feel do Bly Manor no favors. Essentially making the whole thing come off as Hill House, but annoying.
If this really is supposed to be a love story, it's a rather poor one given the lengths it goes through to ensure everyone ends up alone by the end. It does feature some great lessons about love however. The way it critiques possession over genuine affection and things like toxic masculinity among others works because it's not preachy or insulting in its delivery. It never points the finger, just reveals that these things do unfortunately exist and can cause real harm.
The pacing can be downright atrocious. The early episodes are almost painfully uninteresting outside of the promise of the mystery at hand as not much happens in them, and things darn near crawl to a halt in the final two after the show runners boneheadedly decided not to capitalize on a particularly intense cliffhanger by continuing the action from where it left off right away. Instead choosing to dive right into the ghost's backstory which proves to be story's dullest chapter and robs the menace of a lot of its fear factor.
As a matter of fact, this is really disappointing as a work of horror altogether. The attempts to frighten viewer amount to little more than a repeated jump scare where the main character sees someone standing behind her in reflective surfaces, a trick that ends up being as overly used as the words "perfectly splendid," and the appearance of the occasional specter lurking at the back of the screen. The latter of which was also featured in Bly Manor's infinitely superior predecessor and suffers from diminishing returns here.
For all of its faults though there are moments of shear brilliance. The way it gives its ghosts a motive for tormenting the living by locking them in a hellish cycle where they themselves are haunted by moments from their past is probably the most memorable and standout aspect of the whole thing, while also serving as a nice twist on one of Hill House's more interesting wrinkles as well. Plus, the entire middle portion is pretty fantastic as that is where the emotions are at their highest, the tension is at its max, and the reveals are flowing. I even liked how not every entity the character's encounter actually exists at all. Some are just figments of their imagination spawned from past regrets.
Unfortunately, questionable decision making from Flanagan and crew make this mini-series feel messy, uneven, and poorly thought-out. Like how there's a major villain swap right at the conclusion that makes both foes feel inconsequential in a way or how none of the supporting character's subplots go anywhere so you're left wondering why they were included in the first place. As engrossing as it can be at times, these cracks in Bly's foundation keep it from ever being a truly satisfying watch. Especially considering it's following an act that was practically flawless.
If you're looking for something in the vain of "Hill House", "Bly Manor" will not have it. "Hill House" was almost perfect in every sense. A great intricate story, great acting, scary, haunting, emotional and heartbreaking. "Bly Manor" is stripped of all that. It's more of an uninteresting, dragged out, not very haunting dark love story, with a huge disconnect with the characters that simply makes you not care. While "Hill House" had me glued to the seat through all episodes, "Bly Manor" was a chore to get through.
One of the worst series that I have seen on Netflix. You could tell they had to stretch an hour-long story over nine hours. Hill House was one of the best Netflix shows made in comparison. The accents and writing don't help but what on earth went wrong?
One good episode of 9 is about 1 point ... Okay, I'll give 2. If you want to watch the series, and not play the radio, then watch something else. Ten-minute monologues accompanied by sad music have become a tradition in almost every episode. This is terrible! And seriously, none of the critics noticed this? Seriously? ...