The Haunting of Bly Manor is Netflix's follow-up to their 2018 hit show The Haunting of Hill House, but it's not a sequel. It's an entirely new story based on the works of horror writer Henry James, especially his famous novella The Turn of the Screw. It's about an American woman who goes to work as a live-in caretaker for two orphaned children in England, and soon after she arrives, spooky stuff begins to happen.
I think The Haunting of Hill House is one of the greatest horror stories I've ever seen in any format, and Bly Manor is done by pretty much the same creative team, so I was super excited for it. Granted, I wasn't expecting it to be quite as good (lightning in a bottle is hard to catch twice!), but I still had very high hopes. Unfortunately, though, I found it pretty disappointing. On the whole, it's a mixed bag that stars out with a ton of potential and then squanders it as the show goes on.
The first few episodes were really good, and they set up some intriguing supernatural mysteries that I was excited to dive into. I also really liked the characters, I thought the acting was very good, and Bly Manor itself was really cool. Those last three elements remained pretty constant throughout the nine-episode run, and they were the only thing that made it worth watching (other than the fact that I'm such a big fan of Hill House that I had to see this one through to the end). But everything else just went downhill after about episode three.
The deeper the show got into the main ghosts and what exactly they were trying to do, the more bored I became. At one point, their interactions with the characters even reminded me of Sinister 2. If you've never seen that movie, don't go looking for it. It's not good, and one of the worst things about it is that it lets you see way too much of what the ghosts are actually doing. When it comes to showing evil spirits onscreen, less is usually more, but the filmmakers behind Sinister 2 apparently never got that memo. And that's how I felt about parts of The Haunting of Bly Manor. They showed you way too much of the ghosts and their attempts to influence the people in the manor (especially the kids), and it just ruined the mystique of the story.
On top of that, there were also a few supernatural mysteries they set up that literally went nowhere. One of them ended up not even being supernatural, and the other one just dropped out of the story at a certain point. They never explained it, and looking back on it, it doesn't make any sense in the context of the show's mythology. It seems like they just put it in there to add some spooky moments, but they forgot to make it work as part of the overall narrative.
Speaking of the overall narrative, that was another problem I had with the show. One of the things that made Hill House so great is that it had a clear narrative direction. Sure, it had various narrative threads and subplots, but they all pointed in the same direction and eventually melded into one overarching story. Bly Manor, on the other hand, isn't nearly as tight. The different subplots and narrative threads go in several different directions, and it often feels like you're watching more than one show. Even when they come together at the end, it still feels like multiple stories artificially grafted together rather than a single, cohesive narrative.
And then we have the horror elements. Much like the show as a whole, I had mixed feelings about them. On the one hand, there wasn't nearly as much actual horror in it as I was expecting. In fact, at times it didn't even feel like a horror show. Sometimes it felt more like a drama that kind of just happened to have a few ghosts. And even when the show did have spooky scenes, they often felt disconnected from the rest of the narrative. It seemed like many of these moments were just shoehorned in because the show wouldn't have had enough scares otherwise.
On the other hand, when the scary stuff happened, it was generally pretty good. Even when the horror elements felt a bit detached from the rest of the story, they usually worked quite well in their own right. The show did atmospheric suspense scenes really well, and several of the ghosts looked pretty terrifying.
At the end of the day, I would say you can skip this one if it wasn't on your most-anticipated list, but if you were such a fan of The Haunting of Hill House that you just need to watch its follow-up, then I'd say The Haunting of Bly Manor is worth checking out, even if it's just to satisfy your curiosity. It gets enough right that it's not entirely a waste of your time, but it also gets enough wrong that I can't recommend it unless you were really excited to see it.
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