Mike Flanagan puts a modern, soap operatic spin on Edgar Allan Poe to mostly successful results.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn’t exist.

The most gripping moment in 2022’s Academy Award-winning documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is when members of the now disgraced Sackler Family, whose pharmaceutical company manufactured and marketed the highly addictive painkiller Oxy-Contin, are ordered to attend a virtual hearing in which they’re confronted by families who had been impacted by the drug. Listening to tragic stories of accidental overdoses, birth defects, and young men cut down in their prime due to a prescription medication that had been promoted as safe and non-addicting, the Sacklers could not look more bored, even slightly annoyed. It’s a chilling reminder that extreme wealth often results in a loss of empathy, if not one’s entire soul.

Mike Flanagan has taken a lot of inspiration from the Sacklers for his new Netflix miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher, though the punishment he metes out for them is the supernatural kind rather than the kind found in courtrooms. Updating the Gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe for a modern setting, Flanagan tries to squeeze in so many references to Poe that it gets a little jumbled at times, but overall it’s a delightfully nasty story about a family of takers who finally, and not a minute too soon, gets what’s coming to them.

After making billions on Ligodone, a painkiller so addictive its users are forced to turn to heroin in its absence, Fortunato Pharmaceuticals is on trial in federal court for its role in creating an opioid epidemic. For Fortunato CEO Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), and his coldly ambitious twin sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell), who acts as his counsel, confidante, and conscience (or lack thereof), a lawsuit is just another day at the office, and hardly anything to concern themselves with. That is, until prosecutor Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) announces that there’s an informant within the extremely tight ranks of the Usher Family, and they’re prepared to tell everything.

Roderick has other things to worry about, however, as, within two weeks after the news about the unidentified informant, all six of his children die, seemingly under bizarre but accidental circumstances. To be fair, it’s no great loss: Roderick’s children, played respectively by Henry Thomas, Samantha Sloyan, T’Nia Miller, Rahul Kohli, Kate Siegel, and Sauriyan Sapkota (their lack of resemblance to each other is explained by way of all having different mothers), are a collection of amoral monsters and dishonest creeps, all raised to think of each other less as siblings than competition for Roderick’s love and approval. It’s an entire barrel of bad apples, save perhaps for Roderick’s granddaughter, Lenore (Kyleigh Curran), the only member of the family who seems to possess a soul, and the only one for whom Roderick and Madeline show something close to genuine affection.

Haunted by the ghosts of his children and faced with his own looming mortality, Roderick invites Dupin, who’s been trying to nail him for years, to a decaying home full of shadows, both real and imagined. He has a confession that spans decades, starting with his and Madeline’s sad childhoods, covering his rise (with Madeline’s help) to the top of the pharmaceutical industry, and leading up to the deaths of his children, for which Roderick bears responsibility, but not in the way that Dupin expects to hear.

Despite that rather downbeat plot description, The Fall of the House of Usher is campier than Flanagan’s usual work, particularly when it comes to youngest son, hedonistic party boy Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota), referred to derisively by older brother Frederick (Henry Thomas) as “Gucci Caligula,” the decadent, fetishy sex the siblings engage in with their various partners, and the fact that the siblings can’t stop bickering and turning on each other even after they start dropping dead one by one. Verging into Ryan Murphy territory seems like an odd fit for the creator of Midnight Mass, and yet it’s surprisingly effective.

Much of its success can be contributed to the cast, both Flanagan’s usual stable of actors (many of them playing against type), and new additions Mary McDonnell as Madeline, whose cool, elegant facade hides a taste for murderous vengeance, and a wonderfully gruff Mark Hamill as Arthur Pym, the Ushers’ longtime lawyer who knows everyone’s secrets, and is so protective of them that he’ll even wade through a pile of half-melted corpses to steal potentially embarrassing evidence. But the real standouts here are Bruce Greenwood and Carla Gugino, playing Verna, a woman whose role in all this is the mystery steering the plot. Greenwood and Gugino are among Hollywood’s most underappreciated actors, and here in the two leading roles they’re both magnetic (and, it must be said, distractingly attractive). Greenwood, particularly in his scenes with Lumbly, is alternately remorseful, charming, defiant, and tormented, when he could have easily been both written and played as a one-note irredeemable villain.

Flanagan tries to squeeze in so many references to Poe that it gets a little jumbled at times, but overall it’s a delightfully nasty story about a family of takers who finally, and not a minute too soon, gets what’s coming to them.

While it’s difficult to generate sympathy for the Ushers, The Fall of the House of Usher is ultimately still a tragedy. It’s a tragedy because all the pain the Ushers have inflicted on people, all the backs they’ve stepped on, all the lies they’ve told, all the lives they’ve destroyed has been a choice. They’ve chosen to be, as Verna describes it, “deliciously, pointlessly mean,” a description that could be easily applied to most people sitting in a position of authority, whether earned or not. It’s the kind of meanness that’s passed around like a virus: a young Roderick (played in flashback by Zach Gilford) learns everything he knows about ruthlessness from his loathsome boss (Michael Trucco), like how to lie, how to cheat, how to treat others with unearned arrogance, how to deny, how to build a wall when outsiders dare to come around and ask questions. He, in turn, has passed on those skills to his children, like a good father would teach his son how to tie a necktie or change a tire. Think of what good could have been done with such dedication and ambition, rather than just amassing a fortune you can’t take with you when you die, and realize what a waste it all is. 

It’s also very funny at times, mostly in the wry dialogue and in Hamill’s constant “ugh, what next” exasperation. The Poe references aren’t always subtle (a medical testing facility is nicknamed “the Rue Morgue”), but they’re always fun, especially when you try to guess what fates the various characters are going to meet. Typical of Flanagan, the show takes its time setting the scene and establishing the characters (even the awful ones) before getting down to business, but that business is gruesome (a warning to sensitive viewers, there’s some intense animal violence in episode 4). While it doesn’t pack quite the emotional gut-punch of Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Bly Manor, at a time when it’s fair to question if the wealthy ever experience anything close to a consequence, The Fall of the House of Usher is extremely watchable and deeply satisfying wish fulfillment.  

The Fall of the House of Usher premieres on Netflix October 12th.

The Fall of the House of Usher Trailer: