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alibi_shopFirst off, no, it's not the Shirley Jackson novel; Netflix wanted Mike Flanagan to adapt it, he decided it wouldn't work at series length, so he wrote this other thing with the same title. It contains various homages to the book which mostly don't work well at all, so if you've read it then this can be distracting—especially at the very end, which has one of the least successful repurposings of a familiar line that I've ever heard. But for me, "the ending ruined it" has never been a thing that really happens, at least not when the rest of it is as good as this.
Flanagan is a good horror director with a great command of tone: Oculus is as creepy as a movie whose entire premise is "an evil mirror makes you see illusions" can possibly be, and Gerald's Game is one of the few Stephen King adaptations that both works as a movie and totally feels like something King wrote. Because of the latter, it's no surprise that Flanagan as a writer/showrunner wears King's influence on his sleeve, sometimes to a fault (Steve does tend to have trouble with endings) but mostly in a good way—he doesn't just borrow some of King's favorite devices and themes (rotating family POVs, alternating present and flashback narratives, writers working out old trauma) but understands how to make them work on film, in a way that King's own screenwriting doesn't. He also has a very good eye: the show looks great, there's some good use of not-quite-right images in the background, and some show-offy but undeniably effective super-long takes, and Flanagan has even figured out a way to make a jump-scare genuinely surprising. And as a story, Hill House takes good advantage of the miniseries format to spin the simple idea of "haunted house drives people nuts" into an assortment of character studies and nightmare imagery organized around two questions: what's a ghost, and what's a family.
You won't get a definitive answer to "what's a ghost" but there are many choices on offer, starting with a pretty disturbing image that we're only told about, then bringing in the somewhat random-looking set of apparitions that stalked the main characters in their childhood and have kept stalking them ever since, then adding some recognizable dead people, while also suggesting that the house itself may be its own thing with its own agenda. In general, the less explained these things are, the better—the stuff about why specific people are haunting the house comes across as an afterthought. One question ghost stories often have to address is "can they really hurt you" and the answer here is basically 1. yes, because they can deceive you about what you're seeing or doing, and 2. no, but just the knowledge that something's haunting you can be pretty bad. In the two most memorable and horrifying scenes in the series, characters who have gotten used to thinking of something as a ghost find out that it's something else entirely and that they've made a very, very bad mistake.
The family theme gives the story its shape: five siblings lived in this haunted house for a short time as kids, their mother (Carla Gugino) died there mysteriously, and another death brings them together as adults along with their estranged father (Timothy Hutton). I don't know what it's like to have a large family (or one with money—part of the plot is that they're only staying in this place because the parents are real estate speculators and it's a big investment) but pretty much everything about these people rang true to me: the different degrees of closeness among the siblings, the variations in what they remember, the ways they handle loss and betrayal and addiction, and the fear that the mother's apparent mental illness is an inescapable part of them. The cast is all good—Gugino and Oliver Jackson-Cohen do particularly well with roles that could easily be clichéd, and Elizabeth Reaser as the oldest sister is one of my favorite fictional morticians—but Hutton is really outstanding as a guy who looks frazzled and broken but has faced his fears in a way that the others haven't. I also enjoyed how the series handles the minor roles—all the people we briefly see in the main characters' lives are well defined and well acted.
It all feels very confident in where it's going right up to the last 20 minutes, at which point, as you've probably heard, it kind of falls apart (although, unlike many reviewers who've said the ending is all upbeat, I think there's meant to be at least a little ambiguity there about whether certain people who think they've made a good deal are correct). But by then it's already given us basically the resolution we needed, which was just to see these people finally come to terms with what happened to their lives, regardless of whether they're going to survive it.
Flanagan is a good horror director with a great command of tone: Oculus is as creepy as a movie whose entire premise is "an evil mirror makes you see illusions" can possibly be, and Gerald's Game is one of the few Stephen King adaptations that both works as a movie and totally feels like something King wrote. Because of the latter, it's no surprise that Flanagan as a writer/showrunner wears King's influence on his sleeve, sometimes to a fault (Steve does tend to have trouble with endings) but mostly in a good way—he doesn't just borrow some of King's favorite devices and themes (rotating family POVs, alternating present and flashback narratives, writers working out old trauma) but understands how to make them work on film, in a way that King's own screenwriting doesn't. He also has a very good eye: the show looks great, there's some good use of not-quite-right images in the background, and some show-offy but undeniably effective super-long takes, and Flanagan has even figured out a way to make a jump-scare genuinely surprising. And as a story, Hill House takes good advantage of the miniseries format to spin the simple idea of "haunted house drives people nuts" into an assortment of character studies and nightmare imagery organized around two questions: what's a ghost, and what's a family.
You won't get a definitive answer to "what's a ghost" but there are many choices on offer, starting with a pretty disturbing image that we're only told about, then bringing in the somewhat random-looking set of apparitions that stalked the main characters in their childhood and have kept stalking them ever since, then adding some recognizable dead people, while also suggesting that the house itself may be its own thing with its own agenda. In general, the less explained these things are, the better—the stuff about why specific people are haunting the house comes across as an afterthought. One question ghost stories often have to address is "can they really hurt you" and the answer here is basically 1. yes, because they can deceive you about what you're seeing or doing, and 2. no, but just the knowledge that something's haunting you can be pretty bad. In the two most memorable and horrifying scenes in the series, characters who have gotten used to thinking of something as a ghost find out that it's something else entirely and that they've made a very, very bad mistake.
The family theme gives the story its shape: five siblings lived in this haunted house for a short time as kids, their mother (Carla Gugino) died there mysteriously, and another death brings them together as adults along with their estranged father (Timothy Hutton). I don't know what it's like to have a large family (or one with money—part of the plot is that they're only staying in this place because the parents are real estate speculators and it's a big investment) but pretty much everything about these people rang true to me: the different degrees of closeness among the siblings, the variations in what they remember, the ways they handle loss and betrayal and addiction, and the fear that the mother's apparent mental illness is an inescapable part of them. The cast is all good—Gugino and Oliver Jackson-Cohen do particularly well with roles that could easily be clichéd, and Elizabeth Reaser as the oldest sister is one of my favorite fictional morticians—but Hutton is really outstanding as a guy who looks frazzled and broken but has faced his fears in a way that the others haven't. I also enjoyed how the series handles the minor roles—all the people we briefly see in the main characters' lives are well defined and well acted.
It all feels very confident in where it's going right up to the last 20 minutes, at which point, as you've probably heard, it kind of falls apart (although, unlike many reviewers who've said the ending is all upbeat, I think there's meant to be at least a little ambiguity there about whether certain people who think they've made a good deal are correct). But by then it's already given us basically the resolution we needed, which was just to see these people finally come to terms with what happened to their lives, regardless of whether they're going to survive it.
