A young governess is hired to look after orphans at their family country house. Soon after arriving at the Bly estate, she begins to experience strange occurrences and a grim history starts to unravel.

Created by Mike (Doctor Sleep) Flanagan, this follow-up to his 2018 The Haunting of Hill House shares many of the same cast members, this time taking Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw as inspiration rather than a Shirley Jackson classic.

It’s a risky venture, as there’s already a definitive version of the story – Jack Clayton’s excellent 1961 movie The Innocents – and it has been remade as recently as this year’s The Turning. Which all means that a lot of people will already know the central twist (no, I won’t spoil it here) and will be relying on Flanagan to deliver more Hill House jump scares. In which case, they are likely to be disappointed, because this is far more of a gothic romance than a horror story and a little too gentle for those seeking Halloween thrills.

Carla Gugino is our storyteller, taking us back to London 1987 – and her awful Northern English accent is one of the most shocking things here. She tells of how Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti – The Haunting of Hill House) takes a job as an au pair for two challenging orphan children, Miles and Flora. Their uncle (a super posh Henry Thomas) explains that the job has been a hard one to sell because the previous governess took her own life.

Unperturbed, Dani takes the role and is soon down at Bly Manor in Wessex where she meets the children, housekeeper, cook/driver and gardener. Something is a little off, and we discover why Miles was sent home from boarding school in disgrace. But it’s episode three where the story takes off as we flashback to the obsessive relationship between Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen – awful Scots accent) and previous nanny Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif). The house, and those who cross its threshold, holds many secrets, and we’re just scratching the surface.

Verdict: Dodgy dialogue and accents can’t help distract from a mildly spooky story that’s far tamer then most of Flanagan’s previous work. Let’s hope that things pick up as the screw begins to turn. 6/10

Nick Joy