The Haunting: Season 2 - The Haunting of Bly Manor

Flanagan has taken one of the most elegantly simple and enigmatic of novellas and found a way to over-explain everything from plot mechanics to theme, producing a nine-episode season that's sensuous, spooky and evasive one moment and cumbersomely obvious the next.

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.

“Bly Manor” stands as an ambitious blend of genres and arrives at its ultimate point with proper gravity. It’s not a great ghost story, it’s not a great love story, but it’s still haunting enough to hear out.

Once the circle completes itself, the whole thing feels richer than it sometimes does in parts, even if Flanagan, like our narrator, easily could have told this story in a more compact form.

Bly Manor might not be scary but it certainly sticks in your brain long after it’s over, because stories—like houses, like people—don’t have to horrify to be haunting.

The Haunting of Bly Manor is an entertaining and evocative followup to Hill House, despite never quite reaching the heights of its predecessor.

[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 “Hill House” provided a blueprint in how to tell a long, heartbreaking, and actually scary story, the failures and indulgences of “Bly Manor” are unfortunate examples in how not to.