The Haunting of Bly Manor is Not a Ghost Story
The Haunting of Bly Manor. Image courtesy of Netflix.
These days, people who love adaptations of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw are spoiled for choice - we had a really terrible version dumped on us earlier this year, right before cinemas closed down. Would this classic ghost story fare better in the hands of Netflix and Mike Flanagan?
The overall production values, writing, casting and acting are certainly much better. The Netflix version is also serialized, as was James’ novella, so the format allows the story and characters to breathe in a way the film did not. It borrows quite a bit of the tone and structure from Flanagan’s Haunting of Hill House, in a good way. Each episode explores the back-story of a particular character, and it’s going for a narrative in which the sadness of the characters, and the strength they find in one another, is the real point of the story rather than the ghosts or the jump scares.
It’s creepy and moody and at times a little scary, but it’s ultimate goal is not to be a ghost story. And that may rub some people the wrong way, as it did with Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak in 2015 - a lot of critics came away from that movie saying, hey where da ghostz? But like Crimson Peak, Bly Manor specifically addresses these audience reactions (albeit at the very end) and baldly states “This is not a ghost story - it’s a love story.”
So, as a love story does it work? Yes, it does. There’s nothing like the Episode 5 banger from Haunting of Hill House, still for me one of the best moments in film or serialized television of the last few years. Like Marrowbone, the ghosts in Bly Manor are as much internal as external and the whole thing sometimes becomes a bit languid and plodding. The logic of the ghost universe is pretty clearly explained and consistent, leaving no doubts about whether these ghosts are real or imagined. But even if the ghosts are real, the characters all bring their own baggage and demons with them, so the real ghosts intermingle with the imagined ones in a complex tango of pathos and trauma.
But the real thing that makes this series worth your time - aside from the production values in general, which are top notch - is the way the characters interact with each other. The Haunting of Hill House was about an actual family dealing with their past trauma and drawing strength from each other to overcome some actual ghosts.
That formula plays out in more or less the same way in Bly Manor, except they aren’t a real family but rather an adopted family of hurt people drawn together on the cursed grounds of Bly Manor. And they similarly draw strength from one another to confront their past traumas and face-off with some ghosts. This is actually a sort of simplistic narrative, but it’s elevated by the strength of the acting and the cast. They have this easy camaraderie, and chemistry and that makes all the difference because you sympathize with their tragedy and their sadness and their love and the whole thing has the weight of real feeling.
That is really what mike Flanagan specializes in - not ghost stories, necessarily, but deeply intimate portraits of people dealing with trauma masquerading as ghost stories. That’s the Flanagan Touch, and I think it works pretty well in The Haunting of Bly Manor.
