INTRODUCTION

Just got finished watching Netflix new series The Haunting of Hill House. Let’s dive into the finer nuances of the show and see if it’s worth watching.

PLOT
The story focuses on a family that used to live in Hill House, but have now become an estranged family, since their time there. This is nothing like Shirley Jackson’s original 1959 novel, but it is an interesting concept nonetheless.

CHARACTERS
It mostly centers on a family of six, which spent a summer at Hill House. To the series credit it does try to develop the whole family through flashbacks and modern-day storytelling, woven throughout the whole series. Ultimately, though, the series fails to develop the characters will enough for us to care about. They focus too much on the pitfalls of the family and how they become broken as opposed to developing them well-rounded.

ACTING
The acting in this series is actually pretty good, considering it’s a Netflix original, which usually lends itself to be pretty terrible, with the exception of 1922. The weakest point is one of the younger siblings, who becomes a heroin addict, while the strongest acting happens to be the director’s own wife who plays a lesbian. The children actors are also fantastic. Regardless it’s believable that they are real family regardless of time frame they are in.

STYLE
The style of the show was nothing to write home about it looks exactly like everything on television at the moment, so it doesn’t stray from that particular aspect and offers us nothing new in terms of visuals.

SUBTEXT
The show is essentially about family and I think Hill House has become an analogy of how easy it is for things to go south in an instance and change the lives of everyone involved. in this case, it is the possible mental illness of the family.

CONCLUSION
Why the show does somethings correct it fails overall. This show could have been better as a one-off movie instead of a one-off series because if they decide to do a sequel, I have no clue where they’re going to go with such and I don’t know if people are even interested in anything past this. The scares are unoriginal and lame with the exception of one. Story itself is okay minus a few things here and there was just don’t really make sense. At one point the lady playing the lesbian comes up from having just going down on her lover and you can see gash juice on her chin. No straight character, with the exception of Comedy has ever had a scene where where she has come up with cum on her chin. The fact the girl is a lipstick lesbian makes me think the scene was put in only to entice men to watch it. otherwise there was no point to the scene. The build-up to the end just was not there nor was there any tension throughout and the ending wasn’t very satisfactory. Although it was bittersweet and a decent tie up of the whole story.

3 out of 5 stars.