“You said it was a ghost story. It isn’t.”

“No?”

“It’s a love story.”

“Same thing, really.”

Memories don’t really work in the way movies would have you believe. There’s no linearity; we don’t things as they occurred, rather we them on the basis of a feeling. When we love, our minds are museums of fond faces. When we fear, we seek distractions. We can no longer be trusted alone with our thoughts. The Haunting of Bly Manor is built around this premise of tethered emotions, unearthing decades of stories within the walls of its titular house and forging connections between traumas past and present for an array of characters, each burdened with long and painful histories. Over the show’s nine episodes, creator Mike Flanagan and his team blaze across an epic spectrum of romances and tragedies, horrifying in the literal sense only when absolutely needed. There are jump scares and ominous musical cues aplenty, but at its bleeding heart Bly Manor is an existential nightmare of lost souls searching for escape within the tortured mazes of their own heads.

Victoria Pedretti, returning after her show-stealing performance in Flanagan’s preceding production The Haunting of Hill House, stars here as Dani Clayton, an American teacher seeking work in England for undeclared, suspiciously vague reasons, and settling for the position of a governess to recently orphaned children Flora (Amelie Bea Smith) and Miles Wingrave (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) in their rural home, Bly. Dani is kept company by a small cast of misfits; housekeeper Hannah (T’Nia Miller), cook Owen (Rahul Kohli) and gardener Jamie (Amelia Eve).

At first, this mismatched staff makes for a comforting family unit, though it takes no time at all for the cracks to show, some quite literally. Hannah, the longest serving member of staff, is perpetually adrift, disappearing for hours at a time unannounced, while Owen is dutifully trapped in the position of carer for his ailing mother, a woman suffering from late-stage dementia. Jamie, for her part, is ice cold, keeping her distance from the new governess for as long as she can help it. Every character is a locked chest in need of a key, and while some reveal their secrets sooner than others, each of them brings more than enough to the table to charm and horrify in equal measure.

The show’s core objective is to essentially weave these stories together, shedding light on its ensemble’s darkest memories through delicately positioned flashbacks which evoke immense empathy in parallel to the present-day bonding between of the group. Though each and every performer rises to this two-fold task, it is Kohli’s understated work as Owen, a man who has spent the better part of his life situated on the sidelines to helplessly witness a series of unravelling miseries, that truly anchors the show’s familial themes. Inverting the traditional horror flick comic relief role, Kohli plays to the cheesy jokes prescribed to the character, but does so with the most devastating of brave faces. Owen knows to smile through the worst of the torments both within his memory and beyond, becoming a cosy shoulder for the friends crumbling around him.

That’s not to say that the adults have all the fun around Bly. From the safety of her room, Flora adheres obsessively to the pastime of moving shadowy dolls around her model set of Bly Manor, insisting that they are both real and most certainly dangerous, while Miles bares the nasty, oddly snide bite of a much older man. With less of a past to contend with, this unsettling pair become the engine behind a lot of the show’s most disturbing sequences. Without parental figures nor worldly experiences, their actions are instinctual and almost primal in nature, which is often to the benefit of the skulking phantoms whispering in their ears. In stark contrast to the employees around them, the children’s chests have yet to be filled.

The ghosts themselves are of a different breed to Hill House entirely. The lonely spirits who haunt the halls of Bly could not be further apart from the grotesque, sinister creatures who stalked the Crain family for all those years. Though some are malicious, most are every bit as tragic as their living counterparts. This is a ghost story, but the fear stems from the implications behind their sickly actions rather than from the monsters themselves. Empathy is the key here. We aren’t frightened by the ghouls of Bly, rather we are infatuated with them and their spiralling tales of faint hope and final damnation.

This is also a love story, and while there is no doubt you will gasp and wince at the nightmares lurking around every corner of Bly’s Gothic architecture, the show’s echoing effect is one of anguish. Through tangled memories spliced into a timeline of their own, Bly Manor does convincingly sell us on these strange, enigmatic personalities we have in place of heroes, and it sells them on one another too. These people truly do grow to care for each other, and that’s the show’s true power. One character, we learn early on, is locked into an irreversible fate, and consequently the bonding between them and the others, their none-the-wiser friends, feel like thorns pressing into our skin. The penny will drop eventually. They all do at Bly.

It might be an understatement to suggest that The Haunting of Hill House polarised audiences in its finale. While I enjoyed it for what it was, Hill House was never a show building to an ending, or a final twist of the knife. It was a sensual experience, and that was made explicit through its playbook of classical horror scares. Bly Manor is considerably more intimate, and thus eventually has to reckon with its own finite nature. After a series of stories reckoning with the past and the present together, clashing what each re against who each has come to be, Flanagan looks forwards in time, and draws to a close with the most shattering diminuendo I have experienced in a very long time. The show will inevitably be accused of disappointing on scares due to its more romanticised composure, but I dare its naysayers to lie in bed after its final hour and count the times they go cold just picturing the existential brutality of its finish line. However intricate the first eight episodes of Bly Manor manage to be, the future dreamt up by its beloved characters, all trapped in the past through to their last breaths, is a legacy worthy of the greatest in cinematic horror.

You will laugh, you will cry, you will shiver and you will sigh. The Haunting of Bly Manor is not only a more sophisticated, precise sequel to Flanagan’s career-breaking Netflix début, but it is one of the finest works to emerge in any visual medium this year. There is escapism to be found in its thrills and the trust it earns to lead you through its artfully constructed temporal labyrinth, but there is a melancholy in its methods that will haunt you for quite some time after those last credits have rolled. It is a ghost story, and it is a love story. Every ion fades with time, but some can linger on in your thoughts late at night for months on end. Bly Manor is among their number.