Plot: A modern re-imagining of the beloved Edgar Allan Poe short story, The Fall of the House of Usher details the downfall of the infamous and wealthy Usher family. Creator Mike Flanagan frames the tale from the perspective of billionaire Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), the head of the Fortunato Pharmaceuticals empire as he recounts to his foil, Assistant United States Attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carly Lumbly) the death of each of his six children. What follows is a twisted tale of the modern macabre as only Mike Flanagan can tell it.
Review: Doctor Faust. Shizuka Satomi from Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. Johnny from “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band.
Mike Flanagan?
With each successive horror banger (Oculus, The Haunting of Hill House, Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass) I’m starting to wonder if like the aforementioned fictional characters, Mike Flanagan has made his own deal with the devil. This man is such a brilliant showrunner, such an empathetic writer with dialogue that sizzles, and such a precise and searing director, that Flanagan’s talent borders on the supernatural. With The Fall of the House of Usher—Flanagan’s fifth and final collaboration with Netflix—the horror maestro goes out not just with a bang, but with the explosion of a tactical nuclear strike.
On par with his previous works and in some regards better, The Fall of the House of Usher serves as scintillating social commentary that terrifies as much as it tantalizes. As he did with both Bly and Hill House, Flanagan puts a modern spin on The Fall of the House of Usher, turning the Ushers into pharmaceutical Vanderbilts and setting the story in 2023. A thinly veiled representation of the Sackler family, Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell) are the patriarch and matriarch respectively. The former is a ruthless, amoral, and egotistical businessman bent on the unending pursuit of “more.” The latter is a ruthless, amoral, egotistical technological genius bent on the unending pursuit general A.I. and immortality.
Roderick’s progeny are just as terrible. Freddy (Henry Thomas) is a sycophantic sadist with an inferiority complex while Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) parades as a hack entrepreneur and a closet voyeur. Camille (frequent Flanagan collaborator Kate Siegel), Fortunato’s cutthroat head of public relations, may be the most in line with Madeline. T’Nia Miller does a complete 180 from her role as Hannah Grose in Bly Manor, playing a gifted but unethical surgeon while Rahul Kohli is a drug-addicted video game publisher. Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) is the youngest and most Gen-Z of the bunch, who pursues a hedonistic lifestyle while trying to develop the perfect, exclusive party.
The only Usher with any redeemable value is Kyliegh Curran’s Lenore who serves as one of the few moral and ethical people in the entire series. Thank goodness for Curran and Carl Lumbly’s excellent C. Auguste Dupin, the Assistant United States Attorney General who has a unique past with Roderick and has been trying to take down the Usher family for years. While Roderick’s tragedy as it unfolds evokes some sympathy (if not empathy) he’s reprehensible and we need characters like Dupin and Lenore to root for.
What makes The Fall of the House of Usher a compelling experience is the way in which Flanagan chooses to frame the narrative. It quite literally is a framed narrative. After a quick funeral scene, the show quickly transitions to Roderick Usher’s gloomy, haunted childhood home where Roderick gives his confession to Dupin. The setting is quite actually “a midnight dreary” with the anchoring interview set in a room illuminated by oil lamps and a thunderstorm raging outside. Dupin and Roderick’s only company is some Henri IV Dudognon Heritage Cognac…and maybe the Usher patriarch’s mother and sister.
From there Flanagan relays the story in flashbacks with subsequent episodes revealing the circumstances of each Usher child’s death. Indeed, every episode (with the exception of the first and concluding ones) takes its title from a Poe short story. Furthermore, each short story heavily influences the specific episode with the tale being a modern take on a classic Poe yarn. Flanagan’s miniseries is a veritable feast for Poe fans with Easter eggs aplenty. Whether you’re a fan of “The City in the Sea” or “The Cask of Amontillado” there’s something here for everyone.
Some episodes work better than others with “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” being among the best. Even the weakest one, (in my opinion), “The Black Cat,” is delightfully ghoulish and emphasizes Leo’s paranoia. Hands down the best of the bunch is “The Tell-Tale Heart” with the “heart” in question being a mesh device that could help control and regulate blood pressure, strokes, heart attacks, and other cardiovascular diseases. The conclusion of the episode is one of the most gruesome, heartbreaking, horrific things I’ve ever seen in television or film.
The performances in The Fall of the House of Usher are almost universally stellar. I never thought I’d see Mary McDonnell so villainous, but her unscrupulous Madeline Usher is as chilling as her ultimate demise. Kate Siegel’s sharp-tongued and quick-witted Camille had me shivering and laughing in equal measure. T’Nia Miller’s Victorine is maybe the most dynamic of the bunch with her lust for fame more important than her desire to help people. Of all the Usher children she delivers the best performance. Unfortunately, Rahul Kohli’s Leo Usher is severely underdeveloped and left me wanting more. Curran’s performance as the kind and moral Lenore Usher was also a little flat and one note with only occasional hints of brilliance.
However, some of the other roles were mesmerizing. Michael Trucco delivers as the slimy former CEO of Fortunato, Rufus Griswold. Concurrently Mark Hamill captivates as the stolid but dour Arthur Pym, the Usher family’s attorney and fixer. Nicknamed the “Pym Reaper” he stalwartly defends the indefensible…which makes his ultimate fate unexpected but refreshing. Carla Gugino absolutely slays as “Verna,” a seemingly immortal character that’s the embodiment of death. Her relationship with the Ushers is Faustian but also complex, as Gugino is tasked with playing multiple characters throughout the series. She’s the Usher family’s reckoning and has some of the best lines, the creepiest scenes, and a particularly heartrending moment with Lenore towards the end of the series. We don’t deserve Carla Gugino and her awesomeness. But by the grace of God (and Mike Flanagan) we are blessed with her.
Bruce Greenwood’s performance as Roderick Usher however rules the day. A highly regarded character actor for decades, the Prince of Canada delivers his best performance to date. Roderick is a reprehensible monster who deserves his fate. Yet Greenwood imbues him with a sense of tragedy and fatalism that’s strangely endearing. His conversation with Dupin also provides some of the best scares of the entire series, with each of his six deceased children haunting him at some point. Flanagan is nothing if not a fan of monologues and Greenwood gets the best of the series; a stirring, captivating diatribe on capitalism, marketing, manipulation, and lemons (trust me you’ll understand when you see it), that had my jaw on the floor. Greenwood rises to Emmy-level great with this role.
Furthermore, it wouldn’t be a Mike Flanagan horror romp without some biting social commentary. Thankfully, The Fall of the House of Usher possesses it in abundance. Wealth disparity, consumerism, narcissism, the constant need for online validation, the pursuit of “more” at all costs, and the opioid crisis are just a few. Yet Flanagan’s subtle (and not so subtle) themes never feel pedantic or preachy, with one exception towards the end of the final episode. The one aspect that intrigued me the most was a conversation between Madeline and Roderick about how billionaires aren’t just the problem when it comes to wealth disparity and poverty. We’ve created a society of a million hungry first-world mouths that constantly cry out for entertainment, distraction, and surcease of sorrow (i.e., pain). We, the populous are culpable as well. Usher and his ilk may peddle ligadone (a drug stand-in for Oxycontin) looking to reap the profits without counting the cost, however, the target demographic (humans) exists for a reason. We avoid examining that reason at our own peril.
If you’re looking for a scintillatingly spooky time to cap off your horror season and rock the Halloween holiday right, I highly suggest you check out Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher. It’s a tremendous capstone to his run on Netflix. Flanagan’s such a master of this genre that when I think of the possibility of him retiring there’s only one response:
Nevermore.
1 God Awful Blind Yourself With Acid Bad
2 Straight Garbage
3 Bad
4 Sub Par
5 Average
6 Ok
7 Good
8 Great
9 Excellent
10 A Must See
The Fall of the House of Usher : 9/10
