‘Haunting Of Bly Manor’: Mike Flanagan Returns To Ruin Your Sleep In Creepy ‘Hill House’ Followup [Review]

Mike Flanagan is back to ruin your sleep this October. The director of Netflix hits like “Gerald’s Game” and “The Haunting of Hill House” has returned with his most ambitious piece to date, a textured mini-series that weaves multiple stories by Henry James into a tale of possession and how people can have a hold on someone in life or death. A deeply melancholic piece of work, “The Haunting of Bly Manor” drips not with ghostly ooze but loss and regret. It lacks some of the urgency of “Hill House” and will likely be deemed lesser simply by virtue of being nowhere near as scary, but there are a richness and patience to the filmmaking here that shouldn’t be dismissed simply because there’s no Bent-Neck Lady. Flanagan and his team of writers sometimes allow these characters to ramble on and repeat themselves in ways that can make the overall piece feel too talky, and the ensemble lacks when compared to the first one, but this is a complex, daring production in every other way.

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The main text for “The Haunting of Bly Manor” is Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” the author’s 1898 novella about a governess who learns the children she has been hired to care for are not what they seem. (Although Flanagan is also willing to incorporate characters and even plots from other James short stories.) Already adapted once into the masterpiece that is “The Innocents,” Flanagan is careful to pay only occasional direct homage to the beloved 1961 film, but fans of it will recognize a few unforgettable images reimagined here.

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In this version, Henry Thomas plays the wealthy businessman Henry Wingrave, who hires an American governess named Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti, Nell in ‘Hill House’) to watch over his troublesome nephew Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and sleepwalking niece Flora (Amelie Bea Smith) so he can forget about them. Not only have Miles and Flora recently suffered the loss of their parents, but their first nanny, Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif) has also shuffled off this mortal coil, leaving them reeling from all of the loss in their lives.

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Dani carries her own supernatural baggage to Bly Manor, haunted by visions of a figure with glowing eyes that appears in nearly every reflection. She comes to Bly on the run, and Flanagan reveals most of the characters in his story are fleeing some sort of pain, trying to hide away in happier memories instead of the tragic ones that are trying to define them. At Bly Manor, Dani befriends the staff, including a housekeeper named Hannah (T’Nia Miller), a cook named Owen (Rahul Kohli), and a gardener named Jamie (Amelia Eve). “Hill House” vet Oliver Jackson-Cohen plays the mysterious Peter Quint, a man with a connection to Bly Manor that will define much of the action of the season. Carla Gugino, another “Hill House” vet and Flanagan regular, narrates. 

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From the beginning, “The Haunting of Bly Manor” feels different from “Hill House” in how much it places on Pedretti’s shoulders. One of the hooks of that first season was how each of the first five episodes centered on a different character, defining the ensemble before they came together, but most of this season, especially in the first half, really belongs to Pedretti’s Dani, and the results are mixed. Dani feels a bit like a device at times, the window into this world that’s nowhere near as interesting as what we see through it. And Pedretti, who was so good in “Hill House,” stumbles at times by having to play such a reactive character to the unfolding insanity around her. She’s not bad, but it’s a tough part for anyone in the way Flanagan has written it. He often seems way more interested in the kids and the ghosts of Bly Manor than its newest arrival, and it often feels like we only learn something about Dani when it fits the thrust of the plot.

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Around episode five, “The Altar of the Dead,” the ambition of “The Haunting of Bly Manor” starts to become more apparent. Much like the beloved seventh episode of “Hill House” (“Eulogy”), Flanagan starts to play with time in such a complex way that it creates disorientation in the viewer. He’s constantly moving back and forth in “Bly Manor,” capturing how much these people, dead or alive, are going through the same patterns over and over again. It’s really a story about being doomed in cycles, whether they’re abusive ones that happen above ground or repeated memories that happen to those who can’t leave this plane. While he never loses that frustrating tendency to be a bit talky when the strong visual storytelling would suffice, the back half of this season is incredibly ambitious. It’s almost like an answer to the criticism that Flanagan relies too heavily on jump scares or cheap techniques as he really embraces the James texts in a way that reflects their richness of theme instead of merely copying their supernatural elements.

It’s also hard to deny Flanagan’s visual eye. The dialogue and pacing may falter at times, but the look of “Bly Manor” never does. He makes the most of long hallways, forcing viewers to strain to determine if the figure in the distance is just a lamp or…something else. He really comes to life on the grounds, presenting the long walk to Bly Manor as something that would make the hair on the back of your neck stand up even in the brightest sunshine. It’s a cursed place. With his design team, he’s created a setting that feels ominous even in its most mundane corners. What’s funny is that there are few actual jump scares in “Bly Manor” and yet Flanagan makes it feel like something terrifying could suddenly happen even during the most routine conversations. There’s an atmosphere of dread that hangs in every scene.

Did Mike Flanagan have to sacrifice the urgency of “Hill House” for the thematic, historical richness of “Bly Manor?” That’s going to be the dividing point in the conversation about which one is better. “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. [B]

“The Haunting of Bly Manor” debuts on Netflix on October 9.