Family Ties

I binge-watched this show in three nights last week. I’m a fan of Shirley Jackson and I enjoyed the film adaptation a decade ago, so I was excited for this series.

I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect this amazing character drama that unfolded.

Do I give away too many spoilers in my summaries and reviews or do you not mind since you already know the subject matter?

Summary: A married couple and their five children move into an old house they plan to renovate over the summer. An unexplainable event resulted in the death of the mother and the family is forever fractured. For the next twenty years, all five children bury their memories from that night deep within and find their own ways of coping, no matter how unhealthy.

Nell, the youngest of the children, is the most affected. She does something that none of them think of doing — she returns to the house. This sets off a chain of events that has all of the siblings and their father revisiting that night twenty years prior and making sense of it in the hopes of moving forward from it.

I LOVED the way they filmed this series. The story is told so that everyone can enjoy it. If you believe in ghosts and want to see the house is haunted, you will interpret the story in a certain way. If you believe in mental illness and how it can divide a family, you can also find a story here as well. Everyone suffers and tells the tale of it in their own way. Hill House just makes it all happen in one single room.

The three standout performances for me were: Carla Gugino as Olivia, Victoria Pedretti as Nell and Kate Siege as Theo.

The Mother

Olivia is the backbone of the family. When she starts to have lapses in time, everyone in the house suffers. The fear for her was never a demon or getting hurt herself. I can’t remember another haunting similar to Olivia’s situation, so it was a trip to watch.

The spirit, if you will, or the fears within Olivia convinced her that the real-world was a dream and that letting her children leave the house was to put them in harm’s way. She then equated living with pain and believed that cloistering themselves within the house would keep them safe forever.

She did nothing wrong. She had fears about the safety of her family, which then caused her to take steps that ruined some lives, but she never had the opportunity to see it unfold. It’s similar to navigating a cruise ship and leaving the storyline before it hits the iceberg.

Does she ever find out what her actions caused? Does it matter what one person’s role is in your life if it’s just one portion? I can’t tell you, but I feel the pain that Olivia suffers is different from what the rest of the family went through- she has to sit there and not know what happened to anyone.

The Baby

Did Nell break your heart? Put the horror genre on the backburner and her experiences are exactly what a child of a broken home or experiencing the divorce of her parents goes through. She witnesses the fractures of a family from the point of view of a child and also sees that her older siblings don’t see the fractures (the ghosts). They use coping mechanisms that allow them to ignore these things and they move on with their life.

She never got passed this point of pain. When we run into her twenty years down the line, the events within that house are still in the forefront of her mind as if it had happened yesterday. It consumes her and like the fractures from their childhood, her siblings then ignore her so they can continue moving on.

She took drastic measures to end a pain that she had no control over. This was a nod at mental illness. No one can say what did or did not happen in that house, but mental illness was definitely a culprit.

The Middle Child

Theo was the most interesting of the children. She had a gift — the ability to feel the emotions and “see” the events that happened simply by touching people or objects. It could be a curse as well because she works as a child psychologist and most of the cases she takes are far worse than anything she ever saw at Hill House.

They didn’t go very far with explaining Theo’s gifts. There was a scene where Olivia told her that it ran in their family, but that was it. No further explanation and aside from giving her a look inside other people’s thoughts, she doesn’t get to hone her skills and use them.

Again, it fits with the line that they straddle with this story. They gave enough information that you could see supernatural elements if that’s what you wanted or you could see Theo putting on a pair of gloves and refusing to be touched by anyone directly as her coping mechanism.

She was bad ass and the strongest of the five children. Together they were a unit, but apart, she was the one that saw the most. I wish she would have had a chance to speak to Olivia as an adult, but it didn’t happen.

Families are hard. With or without ghosts. These ten episodes go by fast and I highly recommend them.