But no real obscurity is found in Flanagan’s iteration: Dani is sane the manor’s residents – and most importantly the viewer – rally around her. The fact that no one in the book other than the narrator witnesses a ghost traps both her and the reader in a well of terrible isolation that makes up at least half of the story’s intrigue. Much of the terror that arises when reading The Turn of the Screw comes from its unreliable narration: are there malevolent spirits haunting this country home or are they the fictitious products of an unravelling mind? The question of the governess’s sanity hangs over the book like a spectre, one which James refused to vanquish. What’s most frustrating, though, is that in all its cherry-picking of the original novella, Bly Manor has failed to harvest the original’s glossiest, juiciest one: ambiguity.
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