By: Elena Donatone
After the highly praised The Haunting of Hill House, creator Mike Flanagan is back again with a brand-new story and amazingly written characters on The Haunting of Bly Manor.
And it couldn’t be any better!
The new season, set in Essex, England, follows main character Dani (Victoria Pedretti), an American woman that decides to leave her life and past behind in the States to start anew as a live-in teacher and nanny at Bly Manor.
Her new life at Bly is far from easy from the start. The two kids she is looking after, Flora (Amelie Bea Smith) and Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), are very strange and difficult to keep up with, due to their parents‘ tragic death in a car accident. They also had to face their previous nanny Rebecca's (Tahirah Sharif) passing. The woman dramatically took her life because of a troubled relationship with their uncle’s colleague and friend Peter (Oliver Jackson-Cohen).
"People do, don't they? Mix up love and possession.»
Although Dani tries to get closer to the children, she also needs to deal with her mysterious and scary past… and all while living in the unsettling and creepy Bly Manor, where suspicious events occur and where Flora and Miles seem to act stranger and stranger every night.
We will soon find out there are ghosts living in the manor and the kids seem to be the only ones aware of it… What is really happening at Bly Manor and what kind of curse seems to be set on the estate?
While Dani, Flora and Miles are the main characters, The Haunting of Bly Manor introduces us to some other great secondary characters such as the manor’s mysterious, but loving housekeeper Hannah, played by the talented T’Nia Miller, and the sweet and caring cook Owen (Rahul Kohli).
"We're all on our own time, it seems, but you. You just kept on dreaming"
What I loved the most about The Haunting of Bly Manor was surely the acting.
Victoria Pedretti, who already delivered an extraordinary performance in The Haunting of Hill House, is once again magnificent in this new story. We can feel the pain her character feels and we can relate to a girl that lost somebody close to her and who is struggling with her identity as a young woman.
Amelie Bea Smith and Benjamin Evan Ainswoth are unbelievably talented for their young age and they are amazing in portraying the two children of the house. They are for sure the best actors in this new season.
"It really is perfectly splendid to meet you."
While The Haunting of Hill House was filled with scary moments and great story-telling, The Haunting of Bly Manor has more of a slow pace, unsettling and creepy atmosphere to it. But thanks to that, we can get to know the amazing characters and their relationships more in depth.
While the first season focused on themes like addiction and loss, The Haunting of Bly Manor decides to stress on themes like love and dementia.
I was very touched and impressed by the way the show talked about an illness that is so common and degenerative.
As an example, Owen’s mother has dementia and the man gave up a career as a chef in Paris to move back to Bly and take care of her. While he loves the woman very much, he more than once tells Dani and the others that he misses who his mother used to be and he is saddened by the fact she barely recognises him anymore.
Dementia is also represented by the ghosts in this season.
While the ghosts from The Haunting of Hill House were the perfect representation of the people that died in the house, in Bly Manor they are very different and way more unsettling.
The new ghosts we are introduced to are just like humans at the start, but they change their appearance quite a lot over the centuries. Their facial features start to disappear more and more until they are unrecognisable. They also forget about their previous lives, their identities and the people they loved, ending up becoming an empty shell of what they used to be. Does it sound familiar?
Once again, the ghosts are related to dementia and just like individuals who suffer from it, they forget what makes them who they are and they only keep on living by habit, repeating the same actions and holding onto the few memories they have left of their past life.
"She would sleep, forget, and forget, and forget. And with the forgetting, an aliment altogether monstrous. All things fade. All things. Flesh, stone, even stars themselves. Time takes all things. It is the way of the world. The past recedes, memories fade and so, true, does the spirit."
Overall, The Haunting of Bly Manor is an amazingly written and acted story.
Scary presences and unsettling empty halls will be with you throughout the season and Bly Manor will show you its dark past and all of its inhabitants!
"Dead doesn't mean gone. So you don't need to be sad."
Tune in on Netflix and immerse yourself in yet another creepy and amazing psychological horror story. You won’t be disappointed!
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