Some families are blessed and born into wealth and privilege, ala the royal Roys; others have to fight tooth and nail for scraps to survive. And some, born from tragedy but still ambitious— maybe believing a cruel and sh*tty world owes them—well, they might be willing to do anything, sell their souls even, for everything they’ve dreamt of. But it always comes at a cost, and one day, the reaper of retribution will come to collect.
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That is, essentially, the nuts-and-bolts basics of indie-filmmaker-turned-spooky-entrepreneur Mike Flanagan’s “The Fall Of The House Of Usher,” an engaging but longwinded drama about an immoral and corrupt Pharma billionaire, his toxic and dysfunctional family and his empire. And when it’s mixed with a witch’s drop of supernatural horror, it reads a little bit like a Gothic “Succession.”
But as modeled after the Sackler family disgrace and the payback costs of their opioid scandals—and based on an 1839 Edgar Allan Poe short story of the same name with freaky and contemporary new twists— it’s not just that either. ‘House Of Usher’ is a grand, operatic, and intriguing tale of horror, greed, family, tragedy, guilt, and karmic reckoning that’s largely wicked and compelling (well, mostly, until it goes on for too long, that is).
“The Fall Of The House Of Usher” centers on the ruthless Usher family dynasty built on wealth, privilege, and power, but also lies, deceptions, and dark, creepy secrets. The fictional addictive opioid that created the fortune is Ligadone, and the story comes with a sinisterly haunted bent rooted in the past. Cold-blooded and corrupt siblings Roderick (an excellently charming and despicable Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline Usher (a campier Mary McDonnell) have made their affluence on Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, but their upbringing is complicated and eerie, a nightmare so troubling—involving their mother— it’s hard to tell if it was even real for them.
And Roderick—being the cheating lothario he evolved into— has amassed a big family of children that are near and dear to him, though all of them toxically pitted against each other from a young age and manipulated to vie for his affections with their undying allegiance.
There’s the family man Frederick, Roderick’s eldest and most trusted son (Henry Thomas), the Goop-like health brand CEO Tamerlane Usher (Samantha Sloyan), Roderick’s eldest daughter. Then there’s the group known as the bastards, all of the “illegitimate” kids born out of wedlock on trysts and dalliances. A mix of liabilities and assets, there’s the brilliant heart surgeon Victorine LaFourcade (T’Nia Miller), the wayward video game entrepreneur and drug addict Napoleon Usher (Rahul Kohli), the manipulative and always-strategizing Camille L’Espanaye (Kate Siegel), the wicked-tongued PR head of Fortunato, and the youngest child Prospero Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota), a polyamorous, drug-abusing wannabe dance club kingpin.
The expansive ensemble includes various spouses and children—including the innocent, best, and purest Usher, Lenore Usher (a standout Kyleigh Curran). Still, the most colorful character to mention is the gruff and merciless lawyer Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill, chewing the scenery, though delicately), a legal reaper in his own right. Loyal and mean, Pym is surgical in destroying and crushing any enemies and obstacles to the Usher family and Fortunado kingdom.
But this is just the entrée to the more extraordinary opulent banquet that is the sprawling and winding ‘House Of Usher,’ which is narratively anchored around a confession and tragedy in the present day.
As C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly)— now a United States attorney who has been investigating the untouchable Ushers for decades— comes closer to finally prosecuting the family in a new corruption case, the Usher children, one by one, begin to die mysteriously.
So, sitting down with his longtime rival Dupin, the billionaire mogul’s revelation and exhumation of the past—told in various time-shifting flashbacks—centers on how the Fortunato fiefdom came to be, how it corruptly built and amassed its wealth, and how he’s actually morally responsible for all his children’s death.
With the mogul bereft and lost, Dupin believes he will finally receive the incriminating evidence he’s spent a lifetime seeking. What he doesn’t know is that all these deaths came at the hands of a supernatural broker of suffering, an executor of vengeance— a mysterious woman (Carla Gugino) from Roderick and Madeline’s pre-success younger days.
Transporting back into the past as Roderick’s story unfolds, ‘House Of Usher’ essentially tells two tales. One is decades earlier, centering on how a younger, more idealistic Roderick (Zach Gilford) and still-cunning Madeline (an excellently wicked Willa Fitzgerald) grappled with do-the-right-morality but eventually succumbed to ambition and insatiable power lust to manipulate themselves to the top of the Fortunato company.
The other story is still a brutally fresh wound and grimmer: about how Roderick’s children died gruesomely, tied to a mysterious demonic shapeshifter. Stalked by death, they are all killed off one by one, while Roderick, communicating the story to an incredulous Dupin, is haunted by images of their decaying and gory bodies staring in silent accusation.
Initially, ‘House Of Usher’ is quite compelling and darkly humorous, especially when it’s revealed a family whistleblower is aiding Dupin’s case, which makes the already-conniving and distrusting family turn on one another to try and please Daddy.
All sucking at their father’s teat in subservience—all desperate to stay in his good graces and keep their inheritance intact—these sequences are delectable wicked, nasty, and fun; a toxic billionaire father overseeing an unhealthy, dysfunctional family. It’s these early eps where Flanagan’s sense of the macabre, the morbid, and the mordantly biting come together in a righteously entertaining and intriguing mix.
As the threads of this mystery unravel and family members are dreadfully killed off, ‘House Of Usher’ keeps the viewer in a spell of pitch-black deliciousness and frights.
But it can only sustain this protracted pattern for so long. As family expires and others lose their mind to the point of self-destruction—each ep dedicated to the downfall of one family member, more or less—the narrative novelty grows repetitive and old.
At eight episodes in length, an hour each, by ep five, ‘House Of Usher’ has told its story, we get it, and it loses ghostly steam. Like Taylor Sheridan’s male-Western milieu on Paramount+, Flanagan has built his own horror enterprise at Netflix. And like any solo creative with carte blanche, just cranking out content on a streaming service without too much oversight and doing the bulk of it yourself (like Sheridan), quality varies and hits and misses. And so their products suffer in similar ways: too much melodrama and too much bloat.
Flanagan’s Netflix work is arguably sandwiched between Rian Murphy and a CW show. It’s more horror for adults than the tawdry, campy things Murphy does with “American Horror Story,” and it is more mature and less silly. But some of it is also soap opera-ish and or curiously flat and dull (“Midnight Mass”), and, like the curse of a lot of streaming television, it often wears out its welcome, which ‘Usher’ succumbs to as well. Flanagan also takes inspiration from classic Poe tales, the Raven’s ideas of grief, etc., and weaves them into the narrative, but it all feels a bit more gimmicky than it does essential to the narrative.
But it rallies well in its final eps, arguably even crafting something soulfully painful about parental regrets and mistakes. Ultimately, ‘House Of Usher’ is a Gothic saga of comeuppance and paying the piper, reimagining the Sackler family as a covetous, sinful, and avaricious brother-sister duo that sold their souls to the devil for success.
Yet, given how evil, narcissistic billionaires are the villain du jour of every new contemporary story and the way the Pharma Industry story keeps getting recycled as an allegory of capitalistic gluttony (“Painkiller,” “Pain Hustlers,” “Dopesick”), it’s a little bit on the nose to make the merchants of misery and their ironic “world without pain” aspirations, suffer and get their just desserts while haunted for all the blood that’s on their hands.
When ‘House Of Usher’s downfall works, it’s symphonic; when it doesn’t, the orchestration gets overwrought—overly grandiose in its crescendo of shameful legacy (evil Sackler’s bad!), climaxing like three times and circle-jerking itself whenever it goes into poetic Poe-ish narration mode. Still, this phantasmic tale of monsters, fate, and reprisal is also pretty satisfying and entertaining when it soars. Long drawn out and sagging hard in the middle, ‘House Of Usher’ is still a captivating fable about aspirational dreams turned nightmare, tragedies and trauma, and the heaviest of tolls extracted when the bill comes due. [B-]
