It’s a rare thing for Mike Flanagan to deny his characters sympathy, and rarer still for the horror auteur to delight in their suffering. But in the characteristically dense and moody — and uncharacteristically grisly and furious — The Fall of the House of Usher, Flanagan invites us to do both. Gone is the solace extended to hurting families and lovers in The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor; gone is the belief in togetherness and compassion that girded Midnight Mass and The Midnight Club. In their place, The Fall of the House of Usher serves up contempt for the wealthy, disgust with their selfishness, and glee at their increasingly gnarly demises, and that unexpected-for-Flanagan feast is bloody delicious.
The eight-episode miniseries, out today, is Flanagan’s final project for Netflix, the end of a half-decade deal that helped the streaming service corner a specific kind of horror project. Tonally, Flanagan’s Netflix series are primarily spooky, melancholy, and introspective; visually, they are elaborately designed and immersively shot. Inspired by written works from Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Christopher Pike, and Edgar Allan Poe, they mirror literary structure: lengthy arcs playing out amid dense world-building, a strong focus on aligning viewers with the experiences of the central characters, an almost meta reliance on in-series storytelling. These episodes were built to be binged, with the traumas, pain, and growth of each hour purposefully flowing into the next. There are jump scares, ghosts, monsters, and vampires, sure, but Flanagan’s horror ethos has been less about frightening viewers than using the genre as a means for self-exploration, finding the parts of us that hurt and then exploring ways to heal them.
With Usher, however, Flanagan is doling out punishment instead of grace. There are ingredients here from his preceding series — a central dysfunctional family, returning actors, the incorporation of literary elements — and a number of nods to other eat-the-rich series like Succession (the father/children dynamic, Taylor Stewart’s strings-heavy score). But the tone is vehement and the violence discordant, and unlike Jesse Armstrong’s tableau, no characters here can be given the babygirl or I-can-fix-them treatment. The series uses Poe’s words and aesthetic to frame a story pulled from 21st-century headlines, with the ludicrously wealthy, casually unethical Ushers standing in for the Sacklers. The titular family is led by twin geniuses Roderick (Bruce Greenwood, an excellent replacement for the originally cast and fired Frank Langella) and Madeline (Mary McDonnell), who together oversee their company Fortunato. Their painkiller Ligodone has made them and Roderick’s six children billionaires, and despite launching a widely damaging opioid epidemic, the Ushers have evaded prosecution. Assistant U.S. Attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) hopes his case, bolstered by an informant from inside the family, will finally result in prison time for the Ushers. But when Roderick and Madeline offer a $50 million bounty for the collaborator, Roderick’s kids start dying, and the siblings’ decades of control start to slip.
Premiere “A Midnight Dreary†initiates this elaborate setup with flashbacks (centering Roderick’ and Madeline’s 20-something versions, well-played by Zach Gilford and Willa Fitzgerald), flash-forwards, a bunch of fake news footage, a funeral eulogy dripping with Poe lines, and an interview between Roderick and Dupin; it’s a demanding episode that makes clear the breadth and scope of Usher’s intentions, and the extent to which it will keep viewers on their toes with shifting perspectives and timelines. Each following episode roughly links a member of the Usher family with a specific Poe work, tearing apart their vanity, cruelty, and disregard for others one by one — sometimes literally, using the writer’s most famed methods. (The series’s grotesque imagery evokes the maximalist flair of Dario Argento, M. Night Shyamalan, and Matt Reeves; there are no blink-and-you’ll-miss-them ghosts here.) That execution sometimes feels goofy, even campy, with characters launching into bits of Poe’s poems in everyday conversation and reanimated corpses dripping goop onto a boardroom conference table. It’s all of a piece with the series’s midnight-black sense of humor, though, and those jagged edges are fitting for a story that is so pointed, and with so many enemies to point at.
The Usher children are awful in ways obviously shaped by their wealth and power, and these characters — thoroughly unburdened by rectitude and inward reflection, and totally unlike those in previous Flanagan projects — allow the filmmaker’s ensemble of recurring players to be the loosest it’s ever been. Eldest son Frederick (Henry Thomas), raised to be Roderick’s heir, is desperately insecure; eldest daughter Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) is a Gwyneth Paltrow wannabe with her own wellness app; Victorine (T’Nia Miller) is a holier-than-thou doctor whose cardiovascular research is entirely funded by Roderick; Camille (Kate Siegel) is Fortunato’s sharply cynical public-relations head with surveillance files on all her relatives; layabout Napoleon (Rahul Kohli) is the family’s philanthropic face; and youngest Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) is the hedonist black sheep kicking at his father and aunt’s insistence on decorum. One of the series’s most appealing elements is watching these actors apply grim gusto to every embarrassing thing the Ushers do in their cocoon of sybaritic wealth: sibling sniping and infighting, hyperactive cocaine-sniffing and dehumanizing sex scenes, self-righteous dialogue like “Being an Usher is about changing the fucking world, it’s not a blowjob whiskey bar.â€
It could all register as a little too smug were it not for the actors’ willingly zesty performances and the balance provided by Carla Gugino as a mysterious figure from Roderick and Madeline’s past and Mark Hamill as their lawyer. Both are standouts, the former a whirling dervish of chaos and the latter a tightly wound fixer, and their scene together in finale “The Raven†is a gorgeous balance of sparse cinematography and wistful affect, a stark contrast to the series’s otherwise frenetic pacing. But while that pacing can result in brief moments of disjointed bluntness, Usher never gives you time to doubt it, careening between scorn and parable as it casts a spell of heightened theatricality: From the foreboding sound design to the Egyptology-fetishizing set decoration, every choice is meant to signify the rarity of this family and its inhumanity. What are the caustic effects of merciless ambition and unchallenged success, and what self-affirming blinders do they create? Why is this kind of amoral accomplishment a uniquely American story — as American as Poe, a failed military man who bounced around the country’s greatest industrial cities, shaped the Romanticist and Gothic traditions that emphasized emotion and atmosphere, struggled to make a living despite his influence, and then died at 40 under mysterious circumstances?
Usher answers some of those questions far more satisfyingly than others; its argument against unchecked affluence and corporate monopolization are both clearer than its explanation of Poe, whom it would rather maintain as a specter than analyze as a man. While that degree of social commentary might feel new for Flanagan, it’s not that far removed from how he criticized the misuse of religion as a divisive force in Hill House and Midnight Mass. But Usher being rooted in this particular post-Sackler moment of American history brings a different tenor to that critique, making its immediacy as vital as the anger coursing through its murders and dialogue that scoffs at big tech, AI in art, billionaires trying to live forever, and politicians like Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. There’s a giddy fuck-it quality to Usher’s venomous barbs, a sense that Flanagan is taking big swings as he backs out of Netflix’s doors. His oeuvre to this point has prioritized the meaning of what scares us rather than the act of being scared, but Usher proves he isn’t unmotivated by fear or uninterested in gore — he’s just choosy with his victims.
Aside from The Midnight Club, which was intended as a multi-season series and ended with a cliffhanger because of its early cancellation, Flanagan’s TV work for Netflix always concluded with an empathetic resolution. The Crain family forgave each other and themselves in Hill House; trapped souls were freed and a romance withstood time in Bly Manor; Crockett Island’s residents reconciled with their gods and sacrificed themselves in Midnight Mass. But like Painkiller, Netflix’s other recent series about the ills of the Sackler family, Usher distinctly refuses to give its foremost characters any kind of peace. The catharsis the series offers is instead to its viewers, through a satire that rains catastrophe on the seemingly untouchable, and fully deserving; mercy only goes in one direction this time. With Usher, Flanagan loudly slams the door on his Netflix era, but also leaves behind a tell-tale heart that beats as irrepressibly for humanity as it does for horror.