“Hex” is a study of English faces passing as a television series. There is a cruel, beautiful, tawny face with pursed lips and shifty eyes. There is a taut black face with tense temples and a hard jaw. There are many wide, white faces - some nearly livid - with asymmetrical noses and tear-streaked cheeks.

There are sullen mouths, false smiles, drawn-in cheeks, scanty eyebrows, off-center clefts. There are pocks, unshaven beards, oily makeup, wattles, odd swellings, dark circles, bluish shadows, moles.

The British know what suspense can be wrought from sustained attention to a face - think of all those physiognomic descriptions in Victorian novels - and “Hex,” which begins its second season on BBC America tomorrow night, is a distinctly British show.

Only England’s AstroTurf-bright lawns and fog-toned skies compete for visual impact with the faces in “Hex,” in an oscillation that further recalls the rhythms of 19th-century novels. Sweeping images of landscapes typically signal Big Cinematography, but here they’re used as nothing but a break from the bald, frank staring that the “Hex” camera shamelessly likes to do.

These stares, it should be said, are wary, not amorous; this is a show about witches, after all. Teenagers are under scrutiny. Creepy people. Priests. Sadistic nurses. People on drugs.

This second - and final - season of “Hex” finds the former lead, Cassie Hughes (Christina Cole), no longer among the living or the reincarnated or the undead or the otherwise around. Cassie died last season in a showdown with Ella (Laura Pyper). This is a loss to the inventory of faces here: Ms. Cole is not only a serious beauty, she’s also odd-looking, with the uncannily still features that some actresses lately have. Her face, and Stockholm-blond hair, defined the first season of “Hex.”

However, for a goth-inflected series about a misfit teenager in a stormy English boarding school, Ms. Cole wasn’t quite right: she seemed more Gabor than Eyre.

Now we have Ella, who, as the season opens, is stuck in a madhouse. And what a madhouse. For connoisseurs of movie loony bins, this is an austere wonderland of wooden floors, pale daylight filtered through glass bricks, flasks that seem designed by Limoges and brisk nurses in vintage uniforms out of Ian McEwan’s “Atonement.” Ella’s straitjacket, furthermore, might be fashioned of Chinese linen.

Having been found insane by her school for ranting Cassandra-like about witches - the school, Medenham Hall, is possessed, in short, and various student witches seem to have been chosen to save it - Ella is now strapped down until she starts accepting injections from a robotic nurse who is actually an evil faerie (Katrine De Candole). Their interaction is kind of cool and sexy.

But the efforts in “Hex” to build relationships and pay off suspense mostly falter, and there’s a reason this series lasted only two seasons in Britain. Its mythology doesn’t cast a spell, and its dialogue relies patronizingly on clichés. With such feeble writing, the camera, and the faces of the actors, are asked to do too much storytelling. The haunting close-ups stop being suggestive after a while, and start being enervating: Just what is supposed to happen here? You can’t live in suspense forever.

Let me put it plainly: if you care about goth-horror stuff at all, you begin to want to see the faces wrecked. Alas, the special effects at Medenham are not exactly Industrial Light and Magic. When Nurse Faerie sustains a gash to the arm, it becomes clear that the “Hex” makeup team can hardly pull off simple gore, and the computer-imaging blokes are not much better with the magically-healing-wound stunt that is the stock-in-trade of American television.

That’s too bad because all this white skin is meant to be bruised, ruptured, slashed. Real witches, ghosts and ghouls - the “Buffy” kind, the Bram Stoker kind - could have pulled this off, and gotten us to weep, gasp and squeal with glee.

BBC America, tomorrow night at 7, Eastern and Pacific times; 6, Central time.

Directed by Andy Goddard; Julian Murphy, producer; Johnny Capps, Dean Hargrove, Sara Johnson, Elisabeth Murdoch and Elaine Pyke, executive producers; Lucy Watkins, writer; Julian Jones, story consultant; Sam McCurdy, director of photography; Paul Cripps, production designer; edited by Belina Cottrell; music by James Brett; costume design by Julian Day.

WITH: Laura Pyper (Ella Dee), Jemima Rooper (Thelma Bates), Jamie Davis (Leon), Joseph Beattie (Malachi), Sam Troughton (Jez Heriot/Ramiel), Michael Fassbender (Azazeal), Antole Taubman (Archangel Raphael) and Katrine De Candole (Perie the Faerie).