Mike Flanagan's The Haunting of Hill House tracks the Crain family as they move into Hill House with the hopes of renovating and reselling. With the extravagance of the home's initial appearance, all of the Crains anticipate this to be a summer they'll never forget. Unfortunately for them, the memorable summer doesn't carry the memories they hoped it would.
Rather than giving the Crain children exciting memories to last a lifetime, the Netflix series scars them for life. The haunting Netflix series pursues all of the Crains in their modern ways of coping with the traumas they faced as children within Hill House. Of them all, the Crain that receives the least exploration is the matriarch, Olivia. The answer for that soon becomes clear once Hugh reveals the secrets he's been keeping from his children all these years. This revelation also questions Olivia's own temperament.
Unlike the other Crains, Olivia is only seen in flashbacks to the summer they resided in Hill House. Throughout the series, it's understood (and eventually shown) that Olivia dies in Hill House and has the unfathomable idea to kill the rest of her family so that they can stay there together forever. Her plan is ultimately foiled by Hugh who is able to uncover his wife's sinister plans before it's too late for his children. Unfortunately, Hugh isn't quick enough to save all innocent parties from Olivia's dark plan, as young Abigail meets the fatal ending brought upon by Olivia's poisonous scheme.
At the start of The Haunting of Hill House, Olivia is seen as a loving, supporting mother. Often seen drawing the Crain's future "forever home" where they hope to go after renovating Hill House, Olivia doesn't seem to have any twisted ideas. Though the plans to renovate Hill House are quickly stalled by the dark history of Hill House that many fail to recognize in addition to the structural hiccups in the form of the ominous Red Room. For Olivia, the forever home she once imagined begins to take form before her very eyes.
While in Hill House, Olivia is shown to suffer greatly, much like her children. At first, Olivia's symptoms manifest as intense migraines that sometimes lead her to lash out at her children. These migraines stem from an inherited "sensitivity" that allowed Olivia to have supernatural and spiritual phenomena. Within Hill House, this grows into premonitions of her own where she forms an unlikely friendship with Poppy Hill, a ghost that haunts the halls of Hill House. Poppy's friendly exterior conceals a more troubling history with her own family that she subtly begins to push on Olivia. Many decades prior, Poppy married William Hill after the two had met in a mental asylum and fallen in love. The hills experience their own form of tragedy within Hill House and some of their ghosts are seen terrorizing the Crain children during their stay.
Poppy often confides in Olivia about the nightmares she had about her own children and it isn't long before Olivia begins to have some of her own. One night Olivia has an awful sight of Nell and Luke lying in the morgue. At this point in The Haunting of Hill House, it's already known that Nell is dead and that Luke suffers from drug addiction and intense form of depression following the loss of his twin. Therefore, Olivia's premonition doesn't appear that far off from where the plot seems to be headed. After seeing this nightmare and being equipped with the knowledge of Poppy's own sufferings, Olivia becomes an increasingly concerned mother.
No parent wants to see their children harmed, especially to such an intense degree. Knowing that Olivia doesn't want to have her children suffer the fates that she saw them have, Olivia wishes to do anything to protect her family. rather than allowing them to succumb to that fate, Olivia wishes to keep them young and innocent, safe from the dangers that the outside world will plague them with later in life. In order to do so, Olivia knows that she would have to kill them to keep them inside Hill House forever. Deciding to spike the children's tea with poison, Olivia pours cups for Nell, Luke, and Abigail (Luke's not so imaginary friend), but only Abigail drinks it and dies.
Olivia dies after throwing herself off the top of the staircase. With the hopes of trapping her family there with her to keep them safe, Hugh is somehow able to get all of his children out safely. Because he kept the secret from them about what Olivia tried to do (and what she did do to Abigail), many of his children grow up to resent him.
Many of the questions brought upon by The Haunting of Hill House stems from the ghostly figures and what pull Hill House and the Red Room have on the Crains. Olivia is a huge part of the mystery, as it's clear if Olivia was driven mad by the house or if she became possessed by some evil spirit in Hill House. Her close relationship with Poppy lends itself to the latter theory, but Olivia could've easily been corrupted by Poppy's thoughts, making them worries of her own. On the other hand, Olivia's concerns of wanting to protect her family are an ordinary human emotion, especially for parents. So, her desire to keep them safe is understandable, but her way of trying to keep them safe proves to be an issue.
It goes without saying that Olivia is not right to attempt to keep her family in order to protect them. Realizing that she also killed the Dudleys' daughter, who was entirely innocent, Olivia is painted more and more as a villain. The motherly respected motherly instincts she previously exhibited are lost in the deviousness of her actions that even she becomes too blind to recognize. Olivia's murderous actions shouldn't be forgotten but The Haunting of Hill House does make it somewhat easy to sympathize with her because she was ultimately another victim of Hill House. Without the influence of the haunted estate and its ghosts, Olivia likely would've survived and she wouldn't have urged her children (including Nell) back to Hill House where she hoped to kill them now that they're adults.
While the argument could be made that even as a ghost, Olivia fails to see the horridness of her actions, this can easily be explained via Nell's monologue about the Red Room. She explains that the Red Room looked different to all of them and the longer they spent inside, the more the house fed on them. This increases the house's hold on them. With the years Olivia has spent in the house as a ghost, the house's grip on her continues to strengthen, meaning her desire to have her family with her grows stronger with each passing moment. While it doesn't justify her actions, she also can't be entirely blamed for the atrocities she commits.
The Haunting of Hill House is now streaming on Netflix.