The Haunting of Bly Manor movie review (2020)

The performances are all around strong, but it’s like the actors are using heart-wrenching work to try to break out of a story that is melodramatic, flat, and relatively humorless. Across tales of repressed and/or stolen love, the script squeezes them for tears, and these actors provide, like with the big, anticlimactic reveal of the trauma that Dani brings to Bly Manor. Instead of making the story deeper or making its cerebral twists most wrenching, the cast adds to an emotional white noise with extensive, hushed monologues that create little propulsion for the present. Or, in some cases, like with Uncle Henry’s secret side, they’re on-the-nose and cheesy and veer toward drama that won’t inspire wonder about these characters when they're alone with their thoughts but heavy sighs. 

All of this is framed as a story being told to a group of people, which along with an appearance from Greg Sestero (of Tommy Wiseau's "The Room"), feels to be part of a wink from the creators and a trigger for your B-movie sensibilities. With these specific choices, it’s almost like the series wants to foreground its kookiness and match it with soft lighting that makes everything in the manor look especially stagey, intentionally taking away the dark corners that can make for unease. “Bly Manor” wants to be something like high-minded camp, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the edge to be as fun as that sounds. Instead of taking these choices and opportunities to up the ante, "Bly Manor" then goes for the gut and misses. 

For hundreds of minutes, with hour-long episodes constructed of emotional memories, confusing hallucinations, and general ghostly visions, the series is like getting lost in a labyrinth and losing your will to reach the exit. All until “Bly Manor” hands you a map in episode eight, a flashback (that can’t be spoiled) to end all of the series’ countless flashbacks, a narrative copout dressed up in period clothing, slathered with even more voice-over. It’s an episode that does so much explaining that you practically think the series is done. But there’s another long episode, and only in the last 45 minutes of “Bly Manor” do you understand what the main focus of the series was meant to be throughout all of the different character backstories that took up so much time. "Bly Manor" drags you through the mud, up some stairs, and back down again to reach a profundity that proves to be as plain as it is self-serious.

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