TV Review: The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)

The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) created for television by Mike Flanagan from the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw

American au pair Dani (Victoria Pedretti) takes a job at a remote English estate for Henry (Henry Thomas) a man who wants his niece and nephew looked after. She's very overqualified intellectually for the position but is a little desperate not to go back to America for mysterious reasons. Henry stays in the city because he is desperate not to deal directly with the kids for mysterious reasons. When she arrives at Bly Manor, she meets housekeeper Hannah (T'Nia Miller), cook Owen (Rahul Kohli), and gardener Jamie (Amelia Eve). They all have their problems that they keep buried inside. Part of the angst is the fate of the previous au pair (Tahira Sharif) who died there less than a year ago  under trying circumstances. The kids need an au pair because their parents died a little over a year ago, so the children have their own trauma to deal with. Losing another caretaker doesn't help; nor does the creepy atmosphere of the house, the gardens, and the rest of the estate (swampy areas, a misty lake, an old well, and a small medieval chapel). And the spectral entities wandering around. Plenty of elements are available to mix together for a tale with a lot of spooky bits.

Unfortunately, the elements aren't really mixed that well. A lot of characters have their own problems that are only tangentially related to the mystery of the manor. Dani's backstory, while providing an episode's worth of exposition and creepy moments, doesn't contribute to the main story in any substantial way. Other people's stories are more connected but could just have easily been their own episodes in an anthology series. A lesbian romance is introduced which leads to an extended and unnecessary narrative after the action at Bly is done. Some of the twists are obvious long before they are revealed, lessening the overall tension. Flanagan is good at atmosphere and having individual scenes that are intense and scary, but as a whole the show is much less satisfying.

Mildly recommended--I don't regret having seen it but I am not sure I would recommend it to others. It's made me want to re-read the Henry James story, so that's good.

Currently (November 2021) this is only streaming on Netflix.