Mike Flanagan stormed onto the mainstream scene with 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House, and it’s not hyperbole to say that streaming horror hasn't been the same since. His sumptuously visceral psychological drama about a family shattered by generational tragedy enthralled audiences of all tastes, even those who dislike thrill-and-chill material. The Haunting of Hill House defined the idiom “lightning in a bottle,” especially since Netflix’s binge-watch method means television shows are, by and large, forgotten as quickly as they’re consumed.

Enamored viewers awaited his next anthology entry, The Haunting of Bly Manor, with bated breath. While far from a failure, Bly Manor‘s 88% Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score compared to Hill House‘s 93% reflects a less enthusiastic reception. At the risk of making a blanket statement, Bly Manor seems to have faded into the realm reserved for overlooked and underappreciated projects. Granted, the miniseries’ meditative atmosphere doesn’t produce its predecessor’s brazen scares. It’s not supposed to. Flanagan avoids repeating himself, and Bly Manor‘s slightly polarizing differences don’t preclude it from being as textured and blood-curdling as Hill House. Encased inside foreboding Gothic horror trappings is a mesmerizing love story and family drama that just happens to feature ghosts.

‘The Haunting of Bly Manor’ Replaces Overt Jump Scares With Looming Menace

Like a proto-The Fall of the House of Usher, Flanagan’s non-linear interpretation of Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw adds elements from several of James’ standalone short stories. American Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) flees her past all the way to London, having been hired by Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) as an au pair for his mercurial nephew Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and precocious niece Flora (Amelie Bea Smith). Dani integrates with the children and other employees, but from the moment she sets foot on English soil, she lives in the shadow of her predecessor. Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif) died by alleged suicide following an abusive relationship with Henry’s business assistant, Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). The more the overlapping mysteries of the Wingrave estate unravel, the more Bly Manor‘s aura of encroaching dread and inexplicable wrongness burrows beneath the skin.

Flanagan has more than proven himself an expert hand at character-driven horror. Such fraught humanism electrifies his work and suits The Turn of the Screw‘s ambiguous framing. Even more than Hill House, Bly Manor utilizes the haunted house story structure — dark hallways, possessed children, menacing specters caught in the corner of your eye — as a vehicle for Flanagan’s favorite narrative motifs. Memory, regret, loss, love, death, and sacrifice are inseparably intertwined, while violence and suffering infuse physical locations with supernatural power. No one is exempt from the personal hauntings that reverberate through their waking moments, nor from the black-hole pull of the Wingrave grounds. Even literal ghosts either inflict harm or relieve trauma like an eternally looped vinyl record. Flanagan’s busy tapestry of plot threads could easily flounder under their cumulative weight, but the themes unspool with sinister lyricism.

‘The Haunting of Bly Manor’ Is a Poignant Love Story That Features Ghosts

It’s only right that Pedretti, Hill House‘s enthralling standout, takes the lead after etching herself into everyone’s minds. Rather than replicating James’ unreliable narrator who’s compromised by paranoia and psychosexual repression, Flanagan and his team platform a magnificently three-dimensional woman shaped by loss, loneliness, self-loathing, terror, longing, and her closeted sexuality. Dani’s empathetic and earnest but not naive, independent as a survival mechanism, yet brave enough to open her anguished heart to Jamie Taylor (Amelia Eve). Even though making Bly Manor‘s ghosts real removes the source material’s deliriously unsettling incertitude, audiences don’t need an agonized woman driven to instability. We need Dani to confront her living purgatory, grant herself absolution for events beyond her control, and embrace the woman who cherishes her in her entirety.

Best of all, by an unequivocal mile, Bly Manor approaches its devastatingly tender sapphic romance with reverence. Dani and Jamie resonate like a permanent bruise. Call it sentimental, but Bly Manor‘s overarching chosen family theme proffers love — romantic, platonic, and paternal — as a force more powerful than malevolent ghosts. Devotion heals wounds, ensures survival, grants cathartic peace, and defines the inevitable scars we accrue from loving someone. That’s a quintessential Victorian Gothic romance, albeit one tempered with a melancholy hope that acknowledges tragedy’s stain.

Bly House‘s slow burn might have flowed tighter with one less episode. Regardless, exerting the required patience pays off in tremendous, revelatory, and shattering fashion. This miniseries might not be Flanagan’s magnum opus, but like finely aged wine, Bly Manor‘s distinct qualities have bloomed into a mature smoothness worth savoring.