The Fall of the Home of Usher overview: Mike Flanagan’s Poe Cinematic Universe

What does it imply to adapt Poe for the fashionable age? Mike Flanagan’s newest Netflix sequence, The Fall of the Home of Usher, a free adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe brief story, actually suits in most of the acquainted nouns — every episode references a number of acquainted Poe works in mixtures that may really feel like a visit via junior excessive English class. The issue is that the tone is all off.

For starters, if most individuals know anybody factor about “The Fall of the Home of Usher,” it’s that the titular downfall is about incest. The Netflix adaptation, nonetheless, proposes: What if it have been in regards to the opioid disaster as a substitute?

The story follows a chilly, distant pharmaceutical trade scion watching every of his youngsters die horrific deaths within the waning days of his empire. Over the course of the present’s eight episodes, Flanagan creates a type of Poe Cinematic Universe, borrowing concepts from Poe’s best-known tales and dealing them right into a principally authentic story of greed and household destruction. However in between the epic household drama, the insistence on Poe-ing up the joint regularly turns into muddled and even distracting. Is naming a personality Annabel Lee after which having your protagonist randomly recite Poe’s well-known poem to her sufficient to persuade us of his timeless love? In all probability not!

However that is the strategy the present depends on, and the result’s a uneven mismatch of topic and temper. Home of Usher, regardless of moments of intrigue, appears to lack essentially the most central component of all Poe’s works: Ardour. The characters of Usher could also be dying like they’re in a gothic horror, however they’re not residing prefer it.

Eike Schroter/Netflix

Word: The next overview incorporates spoilers for The Fall of the Home of Usher.

In principle, Poe should be an ideal car for Flanagan. The rising auteur wrote and directed this sequence, as he has with every of his earlier Netflix diversifications, The Haunting of Hill Home (2018), based mostly on the novel of the identical identify by Shirley Jackson, and The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), based mostly on Henry James’s gothic novella The Flip of the Screw. He additionally co-created 2022’s The Midnight Membership, based mostly on Christopher Pike’s teen horror novels — and he’s tailored, much more faithfully, two totally different Stephen King novels into acclaimed characteristic movies: 2017’s Gerald’s Recreation and 2019’s Physician Sleep. Flanagan has gained a loyal fanbase each for these and for his authentic works, which vary from his indie debut movie Absentia (2011) to the smooth thriller Hush (2016) and the spiritual horror Midnight Mass (2021). He almost at all times writes the screenplays for his works, and often directs the hell out of them.

As writers, each Poe and Flanagan are moody, greater than a bit shameless, and obsessive about psychological and philosophical questions on demise, grief, and loss. Poe’s notorious brief story that gives a foundation for this work possesses an extra affinity with Flanagan as a result of it shares his obsession with household. As anybody who has spent any time with Flanagan’s work is aware of, the one factor he likes greater than a strong soar scare or a reflective monologue is an opportunity to ruminate on households — what holds them collectively, what tears them aside, what pulls them again collectively once more — as a result of within the worldview of Mike Flanagan, even at his most cynical, there’s at all times hope for a household reunion or a household redemption.

Flanagan tends to work with a core rotating ensemble of actors, much like American Horror Story’s anthology strategy to recurring casts. This sequence, all of them commit themselves fully to the self-esteem that they’re in some type of Poe-ian shadow world, effortlessly dropping off-kilter traces from Poe poems and novels alongside zings and barbs about NDAs and PR spin. Every episode owes one thing vaguely thematic to a unique well-known Poe brief story, with the way of demise unfolding in a Remaining Vacation spot-like hodgepodge of calamity. The ugly deaths of the Ushers (a transparent analogue of the Sacklers) are supernatural retribution for America’s opioid disaster, which Usher helped, um, usher in. The ghastliness of the epidemic appears to have summoned a supernatural Girl Loss of life, a.ok.a. Carla Gugino, OG member of the Flanagang, who dons a sequence of personas with a purpose to hasten the Ushers to their fates.

This setup permits the present to flit between ongoing references to well-known Poe themes and episodes centered on a selected story. As an illustration, references to the well-known poem “The Raven,” the basic revenge story “The Cask of Amontillado,” and the titular brief story happen all through. Different works get referenced primarily via character names (e.g. Auguste Dupin, a detective-turned-prosecutor performed with admirable aplomb by Carl Lumbly, shares the identify of an investigator from Poe tales like “The Murders within the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”) or via informal asides and even direct quotes inserted into dialogue. This litany of allusions ranges from blatant to coy, intelligent to annoying. At one level, Roderick’s stone-faced lawyer Pym (an outstanding Mark Hamill) mentions having a visitor for dinner, a reference to the unique Poe narrative wherein one other Pym cannibalizes stated visitor. One character even bears the identify of Poe’s real-world enemy, Rufus Griswold.

The references principally tick all of the packing containers. The “Murders within the Rue Morgue” episode options demise by primate. The episode named after “The Masque of the Purple Loss of life” turns into a modern-day bacchanal that goes horribly mistaken. The “Gold Bug” episode contains a gold bug. As our titular story calls for, somebody does get buried alive. Aside from serving as enjoyable Easter eggs, nonetheless, most of those seeded references hardly ever amplify the primary storyline — and the primary storyline itself suffers from a disconnect between the tales it’s referencing and what the narrative is definitely doing.

Flanagan takes a type of mix-and-match strategy to his largest references that regularly makes their origin tales almost incidental. For instance, the Poe brief story “The Black Cat” is initially a couple of murderous addict who succumbs absolutely to his violent impulses. However within the Home of Usher episode “Black Cat,” that facet of the focal character is nearly completely absent as a result of we barely spend any time with him earlier than he’s battling his furry demon. As a substitute, that psychology will get handed to the topic of the “Pit and the Pendulum” episode. In consequence, that episode has little in widespread with its origin supply, whereas “Black Cat” lacks any of the depth and murderous depth that makes Poe’s story so memorable. And so forth and so forth.

What’s extra, the underlying purpose for these deaths — the rationale we spend eight episodes watching Usher and his household be stalked by Gugino’s Girl Loss of life — seems to be primarily Faustian, with all the pieces spelled out and conveniently moralistic. There’s nothing of Poe’s lingering mysteries, the enormous unresolved questions of inner motivations and dreamlike logic that grasp over his tales and their topics.

We do get some fabulous inventive moments, like Flanagan’s gleeful edit of a gap montage that introduces us to all members of the Usher household via witty cross-cuts and overlapping dialogue. And the murders — the murders! Decadent, melodramatic, gory, deliciously horrific. If what you got here for have been eight cycles of impending doom counting all the way down to their garish conclusions, you’re in luck.

However the narrative principally lacks the poetic sensibility and depth of feeling, the load of profundity that makes Poe such a perennial favourite. Poe’s tales teem with shadows, with turgid, feverish imagery; they evoke the confused turbulence of nightmares, hallucinogens, and insanity. The dreary moodiness of Flanagan’s Midnight Mass mixed with the looming background ghosts of Hill Home would have served this topic properly, however as a substitute the manufacturing opts for a boardroom sensibility. The settings, just like the characters, learn as chilly and scientific. The gothic insertions from Poe really feel pressured and sanitized amid the halogencore vibes of our satirical household of squabbling billionaires. Even when characters are succumbing to delusions or dropping like flies, the tonal strategy stays indifferent, as if we’re nonetheless, like Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), locked right into a chicken’s-eye view of human affected by an detached company tower — not plummeting endlessly via the fever dream the place Poe would have us.

Netflix

One other factor this adaptation lacks is any trace of Poe’s psychosexual turbulence. There’s loads of kink, positive, however in step with the present’s general tone, it’s at all times offered as scientific and dispassionate and even distasteful: One character hosts an orgy, however solely as a enterprise technique; one other manipulates her private assistants into purely transactional intercourse; a 3rd outsources all intimacy along with her husband to intercourse employees. And once more, there’s not even a touch of sublimated incestuous lust between our two Usher siblings, which is half the rationale anybody reads “The Fall of the Home of Usher” to start with.

You sense that none of those characters has ever laughed maniacally over a fallen enemy or clawed their approach out of a grave or inappropriately interfered with a useless corpse, or any of the opposite excesses of persona that make tales of the gothic so irresistible. Roderick and his sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell, by no means higher) would presumably have trauma over the untimely burial of their mom, who does certainly claw her approach out of a grave within the opening episode. But that plot will get dispatched with out a lot lingering affect, and shortly the 2 siblings go proper again to burying folks alive. And even that feat, which ought to be the Amontillicious climax, turns into little greater than a perfunctory enterprise transaction. The place is the exultation, the fashion, the hysteria, the long-suppressed launch of emotion that lastly erupts within the frenzied unthinkable act? The place is Poe?

Flanagan does give us two character arcs that get it proper. Every captures the chaotic battle of a tortured violent psyche, and every works as a result of the present takes the time to ascertain their characters after which lets us see their gradual psychological collapse and demise. The primary win belongs to T’Nia Miller as Victorine, the center analysis scientist whose pursuit of a miracle medical expertise drives her into full psychosis. When it does, the result’s a wondrously bloody, pitch-perfect show of the macabre. The second belongs to Henry Thomas as Freddie, the maligned eldest baby who channels his familial resentment and insecurity into malevolent home abuse as his siblings begin dying, culminating in a basic, let’s assume, stroke of irony.

These two Usher arcs are so well-considered and well-executed, nonetheless, that they spotlight the weaknesses of all of the others. It’s as if Flanagan drew a line from Poe’s fabled love of opium to the fashionable opioid epidemic and ran with a thought experiment with out giving an excessive amount of extra thought to the emotional essence of Poe’s work. (Poe in all probability wasn’t even an opium addict.) Maybe that’s as a result of part of Flanagan would moderately be writing his personal tales. Home of Usher incorporates many moments of pure, undiluted horror, trendy and masterful. However the present drowns in its uneven grasp of the supply materials, when it needn’t have relied on supply materials in any respect. The important thing to the best Flanagan sequence possible lies not with extra cherry-picked diversifications, however with extra tales which are completely Flanagan’s personal.