I almost never post more than once per day. I finished watching the Haunting of Hill House the other day, and I thought it was brilliantly done.
This is going to contain spoilers, so don't read on if you haven't watched yet but plan to.
It's a slow series. Not very grabbing at first, because it isn't heavy on scares, and the plot needs time to warm up. All in all, it's not really that scary a show. It's more of a drama about people living inside a horror.
It's just kind of eating me that I keep seeing friends' posts about hating the final episode, and I don't feel like I can respond to them without spoiling some of the plot... so I'm doing it here, where folks have a choice whether to click in and read my thoughts or not.
I get what people are saying when they talk about how much they hate the final episode. It's a completely different vibe from the rest of the episodes, and it does seem like something of a stretch into a family-friendly ending... if you don't read too deeply into the entirety of the thing.
The House is painted as this evil, awful place, out to get everybody who enters its doors. What it does is it brings to life all the worst fears of each individual person, which makes or breaks them in the end.
Liv's greatest fear was not being able to keep her children safe, even from their own imaginations. Her demons drove her to try to kill them in the dreams they were having, so that they wouldn't be trapped in their own nightmares anymore. Of all the family, Liv seemed the least self-aware.
Nel's greatest fear was herself. You find out about halfway through the series-in a beautifully rendered, if tragic way- that the specter that had been haunting her, the bent-neck lady - was herself.
Luke had the man with the hat following him around, like a dark passenger. I've heard this term used for addicts before. Luke's fear throughout the series was to never be free of the dark passenger, always just steps behind him. In the series, he'd been in and out of rehab repeatedly.
Theo was terrified of intimacy. She wore gloves to avoid touching people, because they made her feel. When she touched Nel's body, she freaked out. You find out later, just as Nel's ghost breaks in to stop the sisters fighting, that touching Nel made her feel numb, incapable of any feeling at all, which was even more terrifying than any intimacy at all. She only finally strips her gloves off at the final episode, after her new girlfriend proves that she's not just going to abandon her. Theo's loss of her mother, then her sister, then almost her brother, registered to her as abandonment.
Shirley seems pretty solid until you find out that she cheated on her husband at a conference several years back. You see her through the series trying really hard to be very honest with her children, angry that she has to explain the death of their aunt Nel to them. She doesn't really blow up until she catches Theo kissing her husband. She, of all the family members, is the one who keeps accusing the others of lying. Her fear is dishonesty, born of her feeling that her father never told the truth to any of the kids, and then of her own dishonest actions. She comes clean to her husband within the final scenes.
Steven is close to self-aware, to the point of being selfish. In the last episode, his father tells him he's in the most danger from the house, because the house has very little to attack him with... except the rest of the family, who feel that he's always taken advantage of the pain they experienced in their youth. They're all pitted against him from the beginning. His book tells a story of ghosts, but his convictions were that the ghosts were actually personal demons... and he was not wrong. The house was haunted, but the dangers the family faced came from themselves.
Hugh Crain is the only one who really seems to see it how it is. His greatest fear is to be ineffectual. He lived estranged from them since the death of their mother, trying forever to protect them from the truth. Ultimately, this was why they were so upset with him for so long. You see him constantly frustrated by his inability to fix the house, to fix his family. He's always trying to fix everything, even the model house that gets broken in Shirley's funeral home. He finally feels that his family is ok when they reunite to save Luke in the Red Room, the room that represents the private getaway of each of them separately as children.
I love the camera work in this series. I love the silky smooth flow of time from memory to present, and in-between. I love the deep research the writers did into human psychology. I think the series is brilliant. I agree that the tone of the final episode is entirely different from the rest of the series, but I think that's important, because the characters all finally confront their personal demons to find peace. If the series hadn't in some way been about the psychology of the individual characters, it wouldn't have made any sense to have it end the way it did. I'm really impressed by it. Slow moving was no problem, because the writing was great.