This is one of those shows (like another Netflix disaster, "The OA,") which makes you a.) want to make loud noises and throw things at your TV, and b.) wonder how you can get those nine wasted hours of your life back. The beginning pulls you right in with a whole lot to be interested in - there's the promise of a story that will be both an intriguing mystery and a nice creep-fest, the characters are all interesting with some nice implied backstory for each of them, and the house used for Bly Manor is like another character itself. But almost immediately the story shifts into low gear and just... stays there, transforming itself instantly from "haunted house thriller" into "soap-opera-ish melodrama." For the first four episodes there's enough remaining intrigue and secrets-to-be-revealed dangled in front of you (along with some seriously-muted frights,) to keep it interesting. But calling the pace "glacial" is kind of an insult to ice. You watch this and it's like glaciers are flying past you in the fast lane, just bluish, snowy blurs. And the scares in this are half-hearted and minor, almost as afterthoughts.
Episode five was a serious head-scratcher, mostly having to do with Hannah's backstory. For some weird, artsy-fartsy reason the writers and/or directors decided to do that particular episode (and the first half of episode 6,) as a game of Logical 52 Pickup. Hannah suddenly starts...'don't know what... teleporting? Time-traveling? Interdimensional sliding? No idea. It's never explained, by the end credits of episode 9 we still do not know, and we never will. So I got roughly halfway through episode 5 and realized that none of this temporal/spatial weirdness was ever going to make sense and maybe was not intended to make sense - from the perspective of linear time, logic or causality. Klunky and pretentious as it was, it did have a useful purpose however, in that the whole episode was to provide exposition about Hannah - a key character. The bizarre style of jumping around, of repeated - and repeated and repeated - scenes and dialog, was, again, pretentious and needlessly confusing, but once I realized it was just an information-dump, I was able to "wing it" and absorb what it had to tell me about Hannah and about the things she had learned about others in the house. Weirdly, the one thing it and the episodes to follow weren't able to convey was Hannah's fate. I'm pretty sure she's dead by the end of the series - a shame, because she was one of the most interesting and likable of these people - but it's all a little hazy and I'm still not real sure how she ended up that way. Miles-possessed-by-Peter might have pushed her, or she might have slipped. In either case, no adult (or even kid) with a functioning cognitive apparatus would be careless enough to end up swan-diving into the bottom of a dry well. The sense of self-preservation that every normal person on this planet possesses virtually from birth, is always the first necessary casualty of American "horror" screenwriting, apparently.
So once we've suffered through Hannah's trip through the Twilight Zone, from episode six to the end we're basically yanked violently out of the whole "haunted house thriller" thing altogether and plopped headlong into "Jamie and Dani's romance." And lest I get tarred as anti-whatever, I grew up surrounded by people of varied orientations so a pairing of two people of the same gender is not ordinarily a big deal... until it starts taking on that familiar, eyeroll-inducing patina of a self-conscious, preachy political "message," shoehorned into a story in a way that's as implausible as it is superfluous in its utter irrelevancy. So Bly Manor is: Five episodes of "haunted house thriller" followed by a jarring one-way side-trip into "Dani and Jamie hooking up and submerging us all in their romantic angst." Which is about as scary as my fishbowl. This now-obligatory "activism" thing has become almost as intrusive and obnoxious as a street-corner preacher, and it's invariably done at the expense of the story. As it was in this one.
And then there are the loose ends. Ohhhboy. Just pick any metaphor from a hat: 52-Pickup, Humpty-Dumpty reassembly, a cat-herd attack on a yarn factory:
Straight out of the chute Dani is getting creepy Elijah Wood / Sin City reflections of her dead fiancé in pretty much every reflective surface imaginable, but by the end this ghost has just... disappeared with no explanation. The fiancé's fate and Dani's guilt about it are given a brief once-over halfway through the series, but his ghost just... stops showing up, with no explanation. 'Guess he was just a prop; Flora's weird little voodoo dolls are all over the house and grounds and are focused on from the first episode like they're significant but... they're utterly inconsequential. So... props; And her elaborate dollhouse-replica of Bly Manor seems for awhile to show whoever's looking at it where people are at and what they're doing in real time, but... it's as if the writer/director "borrowed" J. K. Rowling's idea of the Marauder's Map from Harry Potter, changed it into dollhouse form, but didn't have the attention span to stick with it or was just too lazy to actually do anything of consequence with it. So the dolls in the dollhouse kinda seem to show where people are, and then... they don't anymore. Other than that it's just a decoration; Uncle Henry doesn't seem to have any purpose at all in the production except in the first episode, where he serves as the warm body necessary to interview and hire Dani as an au pair for the two kids. Beyond that he's just a broken record on "Don't bother me unless someone's mortally wounded and screaming for help" and a weird, arbitrary and ultimately pointless thing about an "alter-ego" split personality, which also... goes nowhere at all.
I will give it a couple of stars for generally good, sometimes outstanding acting and for frequently stunning cinematography and settings. But ultimately, a whole bunch of stuff that was shoved at you as being heavy-duty-important from the first episode just fizzles into inconsequential fluff by halfway through, and then the whole thing turns an abrupt corner, becomes "Dani And Jamie In Love," and we all fall asleep.
Once again with feeling: How do I get these nine hours of my life back?
Episode five was a serious head-scratcher, mostly having to do with Hannah's backstory. For some weird, artsy-fartsy reason the writers and/or directors decided to do that particular episode (and the first half of episode 6,) as a game of Logical 52 Pickup. Hannah suddenly starts...'don't know what... teleporting? Time-traveling? Interdimensional sliding? No idea. It's never explained, by the end credits of episode 9 we still do not know, and we never will. So I got roughly halfway through episode 5 and realized that none of this temporal/spatial weirdness was ever going to make sense and maybe was not intended to make sense - from the perspective of linear time, logic or causality. Klunky and pretentious as it was, it did have a useful purpose however, in that the whole episode was to provide exposition about Hannah - a key character. The bizarre style of jumping around, of repeated - and repeated and repeated - scenes and dialog, was, again, pretentious and needlessly confusing, but once I realized it was just an information-dump, I was able to "wing it" and absorb what it had to tell me about Hannah and about the things she had learned about others in the house. Weirdly, the one thing it and the episodes to follow weren't able to convey was Hannah's fate. I'm pretty sure she's dead by the end of the series - a shame, because she was one of the most interesting and likable of these people - but it's all a little hazy and I'm still not real sure how she ended up that way. Miles-possessed-by-Peter might have pushed her, or she might have slipped. In either case, no adult (or even kid) with a functioning cognitive apparatus would be careless enough to end up swan-diving into the bottom of a dry well. The sense of self-preservation that every normal person on this planet possesses virtually from birth, is always the first necessary casualty of American "horror" screenwriting, apparently.
So once we've suffered through Hannah's trip through the Twilight Zone, from episode six to the end we're basically yanked violently out of the whole "haunted house thriller" thing altogether and plopped headlong into "Jamie and Dani's romance." And lest I get tarred as anti-whatever, I grew up surrounded by people of varied orientations so a pairing of two people of the same gender is not ordinarily a big deal... until it starts taking on that familiar, eyeroll-inducing patina of a self-conscious, preachy political "message," shoehorned into a story in a way that's as implausible as it is superfluous in its utter irrelevancy. So Bly Manor is: Five episodes of "haunted house thriller" followed by a jarring one-way side-trip into "Dani and Jamie hooking up and submerging us all in their romantic angst." Which is about as scary as my fishbowl. This now-obligatory "activism" thing has become almost as intrusive and obnoxious as a street-corner preacher, and it's invariably done at the expense of the story. As it was in this one.
And then there are the loose ends. Ohhhboy. Just pick any metaphor from a hat: 52-Pickup, Humpty-Dumpty reassembly, a cat-herd attack on a yarn factory:
Straight out of the chute Dani is getting creepy Elijah Wood / Sin City reflections of her dead fiancé in pretty much every reflective surface imaginable, but by the end this ghost has just... disappeared with no explanation. The fiancé's fate and Dani's guilt about it are given a brief once-over halfway through the series, but his ghost just... stops showing up, with no explanation. 'Guess he was just a prop; Flora's weird little voodoo dolls are all over the house and grounds and are focused on from the first episode like they're significant but... they're utterly inconsequential. So... props; And her elaborate dollhouse-replica of Bly Manor seems for awhile to show whoever's looking at it where people are at and what they're doing in real time, but... it's as if the writer/director "borrowed" J. K. Rowling's idea of the Marauder's Map from Harry Potter, changed it into dollhouse form, but didn't have the attention span to stick with it or was just too lazy to actually do anything of consequence with it. So the dolls in the dollhouse kinda seem to show where people are, and then... they don't anymore. Other than that it's just a decoration; Uncle Henry doesn't seem to have any purpose at all in the production except in the first episode, where he serves as the warm body necessary to interview and hire Dani as an au pair for the two kids. Beyond that he's just a broken record on "Don't bother me unless someone's mortally wounded and screaming for help" and a weird, arbitrary and ultimately pointless thing about an "alter-ego" split personality, which also... goes nowhere at all.
I will give it a couple of stars for generally good, sometimes outstanding acting and for frequently stunning cinematography and settings. But ultimately, a whole bunch of stuff that was shoved at you as being heavy-duty-important from the first episode just fizzles into inconsequential fluff by halfway through, and then the whole thing turns an abrupt corner, becomes "Dani And Jamie In Love," and we all fall asleep.
Once again with feeling: How do I get these nine hours of my life back?
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