If there’s anyone whose dialogue-driven horror can go toe to toe with Edgar Allan Poe, it’s Mike Flanagan. The savant of fear was already a big name in the genre with films like Absentia, Oculus, and Gerald's Game when Netflix scooped him in 2018. With hit series such as The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, Flanagan expanded his succinct screenplays into protracted theatrical musings on trauma as terror. While some were more successful than others in freshening up that familiar theme, Flanagan’s keen eye for detail and frequent ability to shock has always kept his work watchable.
But with his latest Netflix limited series, The Fall of the House of Usher (streaming Oct. 13), Flanagan has outdone himself at almost every turn. The teleplays are tighter, his directorial eye is sharper, and the entire eight-episode affair is more expansive and exciting than anything Flanagan has taken on in years.
The series, which folds several of Poe’s short stories into an overarching adaptation of the titular tale, is shockingly light on its feet, despite every episode pushing a full hour. But what’s most impressive is how Flanagan finally manages to be ambitious without becoming pretentious. He’s streamlined his distinctive traits into a series that will shock, awe, and delight viewers with its gritty drama and ghastly kills, all while making time for a not-so-thinly veiled takedown of the real-life Sackler family. That might sound like a lot of ground to cover efficiently, but The Fall of the House of Usher’s maximalism works to its benefit. The end result is a series ably holding its own weight under the solid foundation of Poe’s everlasting work.
Though Usher begins like classic Flanagan fare—glaringly noticeable CGI plastered over different parts of green-screen sets, not to mention a fair amount of narrative melodrama—what follows is one of the strongest premiere episodes of the year. We meet the Usher family, a dynasty of bastard children operating within an opioid empire created by pharmaceutical magnate Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) and his sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell), at their joint funeral. Yes, all of the Usher children are deceased, but that’s not a spoiler. The fun comes from unraveling the secret that killed them all while digging into their gnarled family dynamic.
Golden boy Frederick Usher (Henry Thomas), as well as his siblings Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), Victorine (T’Nia Miller), Napoleon (Rahul Kohli), Camille (Kate Siegel), and Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota), have all been the victims of freak accidents and murders. Their deaths just happen to coincide with the family facing serious criminal charges from the government. An informant gave Attorney General Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) the salacious intelligence he’d been seeking for decades to bring the Ushers down. With the family dropping like flies, it’s time for Auguste and his old foe Roderick to put aside their differences and look back at the events that led to each death. Together, they search for what force has been hunting the Ushers, before the last of the house has perished, and no one is left to tell the tale.
Needless to say, Roderick’s propensity for “sticking his dick in anything,” as his sister so lovingly puts it, means that there are plenty of intersecting storylines to keep viewers interested. Flanagan hasn’t always proven himself so adept at traversing the plots of multiple characters at once (the less said about The Haunting of Hill House, the better), but with House of Usher, the characters operate like a real family. They talk over each other, make decisions that influence one another, and stab each other in the back at every chance they get—and they’re each damn compelling while they’re doing it. This twisted energy keeps the series consistently unpredictable, despite us knowing from the start who will die and in what order.
Each of the Ushers has the kind of intensity and privilege that you’re likely to find from a child born into a billion-dollar dynasty. They’re foul-mouthed and cruel, but they’re also all masters at the art of the spin. Though they might have their public battles, there’s nothing this family can’t do to turn the public back in their favor by throwing enough money at the problem. In that regard, Camille, a masterful PR agent, and Victorine, a crooked doctor working on a heart mesh that she declares a breakthrough in medical science, are the two most irresistible heirs. Their conniving sensibilities are a thrill to watch, with both Siegel and Miller chewing scenery and spitting it back out like cold-blooded killers. Even when the scripts are overwrought, House of Usher’s wildly talented ensemble knows exactly when to dial up the tension.
Though Siegel and Miller are scene-stealers, it’s Flanagan’s frequent collaborator Carla Gugino who gives the show its edge. Gugino slithers into the series as a nameless figure, trading hairstyles and accents as she stalks members of the Usher family, luring them to their eventual demise. Gugino’s character holds the key to the show’s larger mystery, and watching as she dangles that in front of both the rest of the Ushers and the audience themselves is spellbinding. Gugino has long been an underrated force in Hollywood, one of the best parts of everything that she stars in. The same goes for The Fall of the House of Usher, which is at its most captivating whenever she’s on screen.
As a personification of the sickness that has plagued the House of Usher for generations in Poe’s short story, Gugino brings the delightfully macabre energy that any adaptation of Poe’s work requires to truly flourish. The ways that Flanagan (alongside his co-writers and co-director Michael Fimognari, who takes on half the series) spins Poe’s other yarns into the series is equally impressive, giving viewers capsule versions of “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and yes, “The Raven,” among others. Gugino’s stony assurance offsets Flanagan’s penchant for the maudlin and melodramatic, achieving a near-faultless symbiosis—their best collaboration yet.
While The Fall of the House of Usher is occasionally tripped up by its creator’s most obnoxious artistic traits (the day Flanagan learns how to edit his meandering monologues will be the day pigs fly, apparently), it triumphs by leaning into elements of that same excess. These Ushers are perfect, modern versions of Vincent Price’s catty Roderick from the 1960 film adaptation, so amusing that it doesn’t even matter that their big pharma plotlines are all but shoehorned into the show to make for a topical peg. The characters’ self-serving dialogue and motivations are far more mesmerizing than the gravity and ham-fisted family traumas plaguing some of Flanagan’s other works.
What Flanagan needed was a concept so grand that it could contain all of his lofty ideas. By mining the lineage that Poe’s story only alluded to, he has conceived a series that not only fulfills the squandered promise of his earlier streaming work but also exceeds it tenfold.
