Netflix series "The Haunting of Bly Manor"
Adapting a book for the screen has always been tricky business. Someone will inevitably like the source better than the movie and the reasons behind the adaptation are always suspect. Is the production trying to capitalize on a well-known title or does someone really have a creative approach to the project? And when can creativity impinge on the integrity of the book? Do authors, even dead ones, have rights?
Such were among my thoughts while watching the nine-episode Netflix series “The Haunting of Bly Manor.” Tucked into the credits is a line reading “Based upon the work of Henry James.” For some reason, the series’ creator (and admired horror film director) Mike Flanagan opted not to state what it’s actually based on, James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw. Why not call it by its title? In today’s marketplace of degraded ideas, would Turn of the Screw suggest torture porn along the lines of Hostel and Saw? Or is “Bly Manor” just another entry in a projected sequence of Netflix “Haunted” shows?
Instead of going Merchant Ivory, the production is a different sort of period piece—one set in the 1980s rather than the 1880s. Aside from nostalgia for the era (let’s wheel out hits by Thompson Twins and Cyndi Lauper!), maybe the decade was chosen because it was the last time eerie happenings at an English country estate could easily transpire in relative isolation. If updated to the present, the denizens of Bly Manor would be wired to the outside world by mobile phones and the internet. In “The Haunting,” there are mysterious hang-up calls on the land line but that’s hardly as annoying as the continual ping of tweets in a 21st century setting.
As in James, the story is told years later by a narrator sitting at a fireplace. Bly Manor was James’ name for his house of specters and the cast of characters, including the unfortunate protagonist, unnamed in Turn of the Screw but here called Dani (played by an eager Victoria Pedretti), have survived the transition to become fully developed people whose back stories are gradually revealed. James’ protagonist-governess (an au pair in “The Haunting”) is in charge of a pair of orphaned siblings, Miles, 10, and Flora, 8. She begins to suspect something is amiss with a lurking pair of former servants, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint. What are they doing with the children? Are they dead?
The screenwriters of “The Haunting of Bly Manor” greatly expanded James’ novella, whose plot dangles from a tenuous psychological thread, into multiple dimensions. It’s a complicated post-“Twin Peaks” melodrama (but lacking David Lynch’s quirky humor and irony) and the numerous plot threads threaten to congeal into soap opera. Some of the new ideas are interesting and others less so. Instead of nine episodes, “The Haunting” might have been better as a two-hour film.
And yet, good points include an eye for subtly off-center composition and glimpses of movement, of things, at the edge of vision. The manor is suitably moody. Even in broad daylight, sunlight ventures cautiously down the long, wainscoted halls. “The Haunting of Bly Manor” becomes a centrifugal exploration of loss in many forms. Everyone is haunted by ghosts, right? Maybe all of us have multiple memories that won’t rest in peace.
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