Amazon Prime Originals: The Manor (2021) - Reviewed

Courtesy of Amazon Studios

The Amazon Studios original film series Welcome to the Blumhouse co-produced by Blumhouse Productions rages on a year after first making waves in October 2020 with four original horror films which played in limited theatrical release before going on Amazon Prime’s streaming program.  A year later, Amazon and Blumhouse have continued the tradition, starting out on October 1^st with Bingo Hell and Black as Night before moving on to Madres and today’s Movie Sleuth review, The Manor. 

The fourth feature in the second season of films in this series and the second feature film of Neil Marshall actress turned writer-director Axelle Carolyn, The Manor stars Barbara Hershey as Judith Albright, a 70 year old dance instructor who after suffering a stroke at her birthday party is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and is placed in assisted living.  Though her 17 year old grandson Josh (Nicholas Alexander) is against his mother’s decision to lock her grandmother up in elder care, she reluctantly agrees and soon finds herself dealing with a strange roommate, overbearing nurses and a bit of an old horndog of a neighbor played by Willard stalwart Bruce Davison.

Soon, however, Judith begins noticing peculiarities in her roommate’s behavior while nearby residents in the establishment begin dropping dead.  Compounded with recurring nightmares of a tree-like figure ala Groot by way of William Friedkin’s The Guardian, she begins to grow suspicious of her new neighbors who may in fact be practitioners of black magic and witchcraft to sustain their immortality.  Are her fears valid or simply a figment of her feverish paranoid imagination?

While Hershey is no stranger to supernatural horror, The Entity being the most ferociously terrifying example in her oeuvre, the brilliant and vibrant veteran actress while good is given the night off here and despite the presence of Bruce Davison is largely tasked with playing second fiddle to now trademark Blumhouse jump scares telegraphed early on by cranking up the bass on the soundtrack.  

A shame because the idea of an elderly woman teetering on senility experiencing either imagined or genuinely demonic visions while trapped within the suffocating imprisoning confines of assisted living creates ample room for all manners of claustrophobic horror.  In other words, it is a missed opportunity.  Despite Andrés Sánchez’s lovely panoramic widescreen cinematography and The Reckoning composer Christopher Drake’s moody original score, The Manor can’t shake the sneaking suspicion that we’re watching a made-for-streaming film bumped up to a quasi-theatrical run.

Welcome to the Blumhouse is a fun idea, in theory.  Also proving ground for newcomers to stake out their own claims in the horror world, Welcome to the Blumhouse has helped a number of filmmakers jump start their careers.  And yet when you wind up with such half-hearted horror fare as The Manor which had more than enough ingredients on hand to make an involving and even frightening picture, you start to wonder whether or not the Welcome to the Blumhouse endeavor might actually be counterproductive to the ever-expanding horror-verse.

--Andrew Kotwicki