Gothic romance and ghost story share the same corridors in The Haunting of Bly Manor, a 2020 American series directed by Mike Flanagan. A young American nanny arrives at a large estate to look after two orphaned children, and gradually learns that the house keeps hold of the people who have lived in it.
What is The Haunting of Bly Manor about?
The job comes from Henry Wingrave, who needs someone to care for his niece and nephew after their previous au pair died in tragic circumstances. The children live at Bly Manor, and the newcomer is not alone with them: Owen runs the kitchen, Jamie tends the grounds and Mrs. Grose keeps the household in order. Then small things stop adding up, and the nanny begins to sense that the manor's history, which stretches back centuries, has never really settled. Old stories of love and loss lie buried in the house, and they come to the surface one at a time. The series holds to a single unsettling rule: at Bly Manor, being dead does not mean being gone.
About the cast
Victoria Pedretti heads an ensemble that also includes Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Henry Thomas, Amelia Eve, T'Nia Miller, Rahul Kohli, Tahirah Sharif and Amelie Bea Smith, with Mike Flanagan credited as director. Because the story is built around a whole household, a nanny, the children in her care and the staff who work beside her, it plays as an ensemble piece in which several characters carry their own thread.
Context & significance
The series is adapted from the fiction of Henry James, bringing a long literary tradition of the haunted country house to television. Its genre labels describe the blend accurately: drama, horror, mystery and thriller, with a love story sitting alongside the frights. Episodes run about 55 minutes each, which leaves room for the story to move slowly through the rooms of the manor and the lives attached to them. It is an American production released in 2020.
Watching The Haunting of Bly Manor on Ktime
The Haunting of Bly Manor is on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can pick Farsi audio or keep the original voices with Farsi text. This page is open for anyone to read; playing the episodes requires signing in to a K-Time account. The service is designed for Persian speakers living abroad, and its menus and playback screens are in Farsi.