
EPISODE 2.1
The Great Good Place
A bright-eyed American au pair hopes to make a difference
... More caring for two orphans in a grand English manor. Yet the feeling of dread is undeniable.LessHorror filmmaker Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep, Gerald's Game) returns for season two of the haunted house series, this time set in 1980s England with a new cast of characters. Loosely based on the 1898 horror novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.
After an au pair’s tragic death, Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) hires a young American nanny (Victoria Pedretti) to care for his orphaned niece and nephew (Amelie Bea Smith, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) who reside at Bly Manor with the estate’s chef Owen (Rahul Kohli), groundskeeper Jamie (Amelia Eve) and housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (T’Nia Miller). But all is not as it seems at the manor, and centuries of dark secrets of love and loss are waiting to be unearthed in this chilling gothic romance. At Bly Manor, dead doesn’t mean gone.
LessFlanagan 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.
Full reviewThe 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.
Full review“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.
Full reviewOnce 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.
Full reviewBly 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.
Full reviewThe Haunting of Bly Manor is an entertaining and evocative followup to Hill House, despite never quite reaching the heights of its predecessor.
Full review[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.
Full reviewIf “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.
Full reviewThe Haunting: Season 2 - The Haunting of Bly Manor is available to stream in New Zealand now on Netflix.
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