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[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “My Brilliant Friend” Season 2, Episode 7, “Ghosts.”]

“Ghosts” ends with a haunted Lenu (Margherita Mazzucco) recalling how her whole life is a series of “almosts” as she tosses a box containing Lila’s (Gaia Girace) innermost personal effects and writings over a bridge. The “ghosts” of this episode stalk every frame, and they’re the ghosts of dreams killed, hopes collapsed, and old friends and lovers who’ve drifted apart. As Lenu betrays her promise to Lila never to read the letters entrusted to her, director and series creator Saverio Costanzo makes an experimental choice, which is to shoot Lila’s epistolary reverie in 16mm. The rest of the series has, up to this point, been shot digitally, despite lacking the varnish of other contemporary series in favor of a loose, gritty, ’60s arthouse style.

The camerawork helps create a claustrophobic, gossamer atmosphere for the most intimate hour of “My Brilliant Friend” so far.

Trigger alert: To those for whom the exquisite pain of first unrequited love still scalds, Episode 4 of this season of “My Brilliant Friend,” titled “The Kiss,” could freshen those wounds. It’s an effective juxtaposition to experience Lenu’s (Margherita Mazzucco) internal torment — over learning that the broodingly handsome and cocksure Nino Sarratore (Francesco Serpico) prefers her best friend Lila (Gaia Girace) to her — against the beautiful backdrop of Ischia, a volcanic island at the edge of the gulf of Naples. The emotions are volcanic, too, with Lenu devastated at the episode’s end by this awful revelation.

“The Kiss” is the first episode of the season to be directed by Alice Rohrwacher, whose sister, the actress Alba Rohrwacher, provides the narration for the series (and will presumably play the next phase of grown-up Lenu next season). The director of last year’s surreal Netflix movie “Happy as Lazzaro,” Rohrwacher...

The first season of My Brilliant Friend, the excellent HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, introduced viewers to Lila and Lenu, two bright little girls in 1950s Naples whose paths diverge when Lenu’s family allows her to enter middle school and Lila’s does not. In the second season, which premieres March 16th, the girls — now young women — discover that in order to wiggle out of the narrow constraints of poor women’s lives in postwar Italy, they’re going to have to get creative. Decades later,...