‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Is Mike Flanagan’s Spectral, Vicious Screed Against Actual Ghouls

Ben Travers
·7 min read
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For the absurdly wealthy, it can seem like nothing in their lofty lives of opulence and egomania is the same as anything in our own. Their luxuries (indefinite trips around the world) are not our luxuries (a day off, maybe two). Their worries our not our worries. Their rules are not our rules — even, it turns out, the golden one. Within Mike Flanagan’s interpretation of the Usher family, at least, the well-known advice of “do unto others” is little more than a punch line. Roderick (Bruce Greenwood), the patriarch of the pharmaceutical scions, explains how a joke he once told his children morphed into an accidental family motto. “It was in a comic book,” he says during an early episode of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” “‘The Wizard of Id’ — No. 4, I think, late ’60s — and the cover had a stout little king standing in a green tower.” The king bellows out to his pupils, “Remember the golden rule,” and his subjects ask, “What’s that?” But before the king can answer, “a little peasant” at the back of the crowd pipes up and says, “Whoever has the gold makes the rules.”

The so-called joke fairly sums up our modern plutocracy, but as Roderick explains the gold digger’s version of the golden rule, he’s not alone. There’s, of course, the person he’s speaking to — C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), the Assistant U.S. Attorney listening to Roderick’s lengthy confession — but there’s also an unnamed visitor slowly slinking through the room. Wearing nothing but tattered shorts, bloody splotches covering its singed skin, the blue-eyed husk of a human waits until Roderick is about to land his punchline before leaning into view, startling the storyteller into silence and leaving poor Dupin, who can’t see the spectral visitor, confused on multiple fronts.

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Roderick, though, along with the audience, gets the point. Yes, this broken world tends to adhere to the Usher’s adage, but there’s a big, Christian-sized caveat: Whoever has the gold makes the rules on Earth. Once you’re dead, those rules — and all that gold — are out the window.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” pivots between taking solace in such promises of posthumous comeuppance for humanity’s living monsters and making the convincing case that even eternal punishment isn’t enough when it comes to penalizing mass genocide. Flanagan’s latest limited series, timed once more for the Halloween season, uses Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre prose to eviscerate a family not far removed from the drug-pushing Sackler clan. Both peddle addictive pills for obscene profits. Both are responsible for (or complicit in) mass murder. And now, both are on Netflix!

While as indulgent and redundant as the rest of Flanagan’s long-winded horror shows, “The Fall of the House of Usher” channels its mushrooming rage into demonstrable blunt force and a number of grisly kills (not to mention eliciting a pair of juicy performances). The writer-director known for crafting ghostly horror stories that double as empathetic examinations of trauma keeps his latest’s plotting rather straightforward, albeit less poignant and more pissed off. Audiences can sit back and savor each Usher death knowing it’s coming, appreciating the vicarious satisfactions along with Flanagan’s standard frights — real and otherworldly.

“The House of Usher” borrows the template of Poe’s short fiction and fills in the details with original writing and further homages to the iconic author. When the story begins, Roderick’s family is already dead. He’s shown attending the joint funeral of three of his children, while an unrelated trial threatens to topple his empire of pain. Seemingly broken by the onslaught of losses, Roderick invites the opposing counsel to hear his side of things over snifters of brandy — sitting across from one another within a crumbling, melancholy house on a particularly dreary night — and his confession to Dupin provides the series’ time-hopping framework.

Roderick makes clear that to understand what he’s done, Dupin must understand his whole family history, starting with his “six kids by five mothers.” There’s Frederick Usher (Henry Thomas), a classic eldest boy/nepo baby who’s later described as “a Roderick Usher cover band: playing the same hits as his dad, but it’s sort of off-key”; Tamerlane Usher (Samantha Sloyan) is desperate to overtake her older brother as dad’s favorite and thinks running a successful wellness brand is just the ticket to proving her worth; Victorine Lafourcade (T’Nia Miller) designs life-saving medical devices, though most of the credit belongs to her heart surgeon partner, Dr. Ruiz (Paola Nuñez); Napoleon Usher (Rahul Kohli) pays people to make cool video games, that he then plays while cheating on his live-in boyfriend and doing drugs; Perry (Sauriyan Sapkota) is the youngest Usher, so it’s almost cute that he still thinks clubbing all night, every night, can become a multi-million-dollar business, and then there’s Camille L’Espanaye (Kate Siegel), the ruthless PR boss who keeps the family’s name untarnished in between loveless threesomes with her young assistants.

Needless to say, each kid is a nasty piece of work (some more than others), but “House of Usher” makes sure to trace their despicable tendencies back to the source. Roderick, while the only one who can’t stop breeding bastards, isn’t alone in his diabolical perch. His sister, Madeline (Mary McDonnell), is very much his equal, both as the brains behind their Big Pharma brand, Fortunato, and as a narcissistic mastermind of immoral money-making. Helping them stay out of prison (and keep their hands relatively unsoiled) is Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), the family attorney who’s never heard an order too ghastly to execute. Scattered among Flanagan’s ever-growing troupe of favorites are various kids and spouses, along with Zach Gilford and Willa Fitzgerald as the 30-something versions of Roderick and Madeline, respectively.

But towering above them all is Carla Gugino. To discuss her role in detail would venture into spoilers, so let’s just call Verna an antagonist, of sorts. Everywhere there is pain and sorrow for the Ushers, Verna isn’t far behind. Save for Flanagan’s last series (“The Midnight Club”), Gugino has appeared in every one of the director’s projects since their breakout collaboration in “Gerald’s Game” (which gets a not-so-subtle shout-out during “The House of Usher”). Here, he’s given her not only a pivotal part, but a sweeping one at that. She’s asked to channel her inner ape, cat, and crow; she’s a seductress and terror, a mirror and a foil, a working-class bartender and an aura so ethereal she may not exist at all. Gugino, always game to elevate good vibes, makes a meal out of the opportunity, though she embraces the expansive demands of her character without ever dropping a cool, critical decisiveness. What she does may be fun for the audience to witness, but it’s not fun for her. It’s necessary, with more than a hint of regret.

Regret fades in and out of the eight-episode series’ other starring turn, as Bruce Greenwood embodies Roderick Usher with the entitlement and anger one would expect from a man who hasn’t heard “no” in decades, while constantly being reminded that such brazen avarice is exactly what got all his kids killed. Pride and defensiveness crop up again and again during his fireside confession to the U.S. Attorney, and each time it’s checked — either by Dupin, an apparition, or Roderick’s own memory. Greenwood can deliver smug dialogue with an easy command, but it’s when his stories creep up to the edge of madness that his performance hits another level.

With Greenwood channeling Sam Neill in “Event Horizon” and Gugino exuding irrefutable authority, “The Fall of the House of Usher” strikes a fine balance between batshit energy and grounded validity. At its heart is the divide between those who think themselves gods and those who see acknowledgement of the divine as our only hope. It’s a sad, infuriating split, and one not limited to religious connotations, but as the absurdly wealthy destroy our only planet, our innocent pleasures, and our very lives, even a blunt, overextended allegory can deliver visceral satisfactions. Arguing billionaires should not exist has rarely felt so Biblical.

Grade: B-

“The Fall of the House of Usher” premieres Thursday, October 12 on Netflix.

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