The Haunting of Hill House Review

The sixth episode is the calling card, an hour built from five long takes moving through a funeral home as a family tears itself apart, with the camera passing through walls and decades. It is a genuine piece of virtuosity, and the show has the sense to spend the rest of its time on people rather than technique. Each of the Crain children gets an episode and a specific damage, a sleep disorder, an addiction, a compulsion to explain, and the house is used as a metaphor with real discipline.

Victoria Pedretti and Elizabeth Reaser are the standouts, and Carla Gugino carries the past. The hidden ghosts, standing unremarked in doorways and corridors so that a rewatch becomes a different show, are a lovely idea executed with restraint. Two weaknesses. Flanagan's habit of writing long, beautiful monologues means characters frequently stop the drama to deliver an essay, and the final episode resolves the horror into a warm speech that softens everything the previous nine hours built. A striking, uneven series: the sixth episode is a landmark of the form, and the finale gives back some of what the nine hours before it built.