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Mike Flanagan takes on the works of Edgar Allan Poe in The Fall of the House of Usher, his final spooky outing at Netflix. The eight-episode series, which premieres to the streamer on Thursday, October 12, follows the bleak, gory, and darkly comedic downfall of pharmaceutical magnate Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) and his richly diverse (and richly despicable) family. “It has quite a lot of very dark humor, but also really touches the soul.” In the series, Gugino portrays a shape-shifter named Verna, whose origins can be traced back to a — let’s just say — very famous Poe character.
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A respectful patchwork of Edgar Allan Poe stories and tropes, this Mike Flanagan miniseries tackles something more complex. Netflix's resident horror auteur is back with his take on Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. You'll have a good time — even if some of the nods to "sociopolitical relevance" might send your eyes rolling. In Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher, the preservation of mood pays proper homage to the author’s words. The show’s social commentary, in turn, allows a retelling of an old story to resonate powerfully in our current moment.
The new show lands on Netflix this week
The upcoming limited series has a score of 97% on the review aggregator site – Flanagan's highest-scoring series since 2018's The Haunting of Hill House, which has a score of 93%. "Bloody, campy, and a far cry from Hill House and Bly Manor, The Fall of the House of Usher sees Mike Flanagan mix Edgar Allan Poe, American Horror Story, and Succession – and the result, while not perfect, is fun," reads GamesRadar+'s 3.5-star review. In November 2023, Roderick Usher, the CEO of pharmaceutical company Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, loses all six of his children within two weeks. Auguste Dupin, an Assistant United States Attorney who dedicated his career to exposing Fortunato's corruption, to his childhood home, where he tells the true story of his family and unveils the Ushers' darkest secrets.
The Fall of the House of Usher Reviews: 'Deliciously Macabre' and 'Triumphant,' Critics Say
The Fall of the House of Usher is Flanagan’s take on Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story of the same name - but much like we saw with The Haunting of Hill House, Flanagan has added his own ‘fresh, freaky twist on it’. He took on Shirley Jackson in The Haunting of Hill House (which was fabulous), Henry James in The Haunting of Bly Manor (spooky but saccharine) and Christopher Pike in The Midnight Club (meh). Thankfully, Flanagan and Poe’s sensibilities prove a winning pairing, staying on the edge of terror without cascading into jump scares and sentimentality. Guilt permeates every frame of Flanagan’s Poe universe, and buys into not so much the horror as the terror. This has everything you want in a terrifying family drama; it features brilliant performances and some impressive scares.
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Alongside his favoured players is Mark Hamill as an unfeeling lawyer/fixer for the Usher family who sounds as if he gargles a pint of nails every morning. But as we know from the start, there’s no point in getting overly attached to them, as grisly fates are assured for all. It’s not so much the “what” as the “why” that the audience and Dupin need to be answered. In this adaptation, the family patriarch is Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), the CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company, and the Ushers are a seemingly unshakable crime family. Their grip on the world starts to loosen, though, when a mysterious force begins picking them off one by one – and, because this is a Flanagan joint, you can guess exactly what kind of force that might be. The Fall of the House of Usher is inspired by the 1839 short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe, in which an unnamed narrator arrives at the House of Usher after hearing that a mysterious illness has infected its residents.
The first two episodes of The Fall of the House of Usher premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2023 before the Netflix release the following month, being viewed more than 13 million times in its first two weeks. It was met with positive reviews, with critics praising its production values, directing, and performances (in particular from Gugino, Greenwood and Mark Hamill), although they were divided on its narrative, notably in relation to the source materials. Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) attends a joint funeral for a number of his adult children, and in a montage of press coverage, we see how a series of “freak accidents” has wiped out his entire bloodline. The Usher patriarch then sits in a dilapidated mansion with Carl Lumbly’s Auguste Dupin (based on Poe’s famous recurring character who is considered the first detective in fiction) and offers him a confession.
We then flash back a few weeks to when the Usher clan were on top of the world, having become Sackler-esque billionaires peddling opiates that have inflicted untold misery on the American public, and begin to watch their painful demise. When one steps back and looks at the whole narrative of the season of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” it sags in places. Most of the flashbacks to a young Usher and Dupin are thin, especially compared to the wicked fun on display in the fates of the Usher children. It feels like padding to get episodes to a full hour when Flanagan and company could have leaned even more into the episodic structure that highlights a single Poe per chapter. English majors will likely know where some of the stories are going just by seeing the episode names. When the young and trendy Prospero Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota) decides to host an exclusive sex-and-drugs party at one of dad’s old factories in an abbey, readers of The Masque of the Red Death will know it’s going to be a gruesome scene.
Usher has been reimagined as the head of a massive pharmaceutical company he runs with his twin sister, Madeline (Mary McDonnell). Every episode includes flashbacks to a young Roderick (Zach Gilford), Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald), and Annabel Lee (Katie Parker), Roderick’s first wife. These fill in how the Ushers made their fortune, but they’re kind of a narrative drag. It’s important that Roderick and Madeline are cruel, selfish creatures—less so how they got that way. What’s more interesting is to watch how the fallout of their decisions fell on Roderick’s many children, all torn apart by some of Poe’s most memorable creations. Siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built a pharmaceutical company into an empire of wealth, privilege and power; however, secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty sta...
Fans praise 'disturbing' Netflix horror series with 87% on Rotten Tomatoes that can be binged in a day - LADbible
Fans praise 'disturbing' Netflix horror series with 87% on Rotten Tomatoes that can be binged in a day.
Posted: Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Roderick has come from a miserable childhood with a puritanical, sickly mother who believes that “pain and suffering are the kiss of Jesus”. As a parent himself, Roderick doesn’t fare much better, having six children by five different women who range from obnoxious hedonists (Napoleon and Prospero Usher) to despicable creeps (Frederick, Tamerlane and Victoria) to obnoxious, despicable hedonist creeps (Camille). The family is made up of Flanagan’s regular ensemble of actors, and to buy them as relatives requires a lot of suspension of disbelief, but for Flanagan fans, there’s great fun to be had seeing how these favourites fit into his new tale of terror. Ruth Codd (the highlight of The Midnight Club) plays Roderick’s much younger wife Juno, a former heroin addict whose life was turned around thanks to the drugs the Ushers peddle, while Rahul Kohli, Henry Thomas and Kate Siegel each take on a dastardly member of the Usher brood.
The show lands on the streaming platform on Thursday 12 October - but the early reviews are in - and it's safe to say it’s a hit. Flanagan finishes his Netflix contract on a high, gleefully capturing Poe’s magic, eerie romance and sense of dread. His shows have become the streaming service’s best offerings for spooky season, and it is hard to imagine how that void will be filled. It’s not perfect – the order in which the Poe family meet their fates is a case of diminishing returns, as its most intriguing members are dispatched too quickly.
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Loosely based on various works by 19th-century author Edgar Allan Poe (most prominently the eponymous 1840 short story), the series adapts otherwise unrelated stories and characters by Poe into a single nonlinear narrative set from 1953 to 2023. It recounts both the rise to power of Roderick Usher, the powerful CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company and his sister Madeline Usher, the firm's genius COO, and the events leading to the deaths of all six of Roderick’s children. It stars an ensemble cast led by Carla Gugino as a mysterious woman plaguing the Ushers, Bruce Greenwood as an elderly Roderick and Mary McDonnell as an elderly Madeline. “The Fall of the House of Usher” updates the work of Edgar Allan Poe for the era of Big Pharma, turning his most famous tales into a sprawling story of the decline of a wealthy American family. It’s “Succession” meets The Tell-Tale Heart, a story of vengeance, power, betrayal, and bloody parts.
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