Decadently deranged pastiche of Poe

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This article was published 14/10/2023 (956 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In The Fall of the House of Usher (an eight-episode series now streaming on Netflix), horror mix-master Mike Flanagan mingles the dream-within-a-dream decadence of Edgar Allan Poe with the decomposing corpse of late-stage capitalism, with uneven but sometimes magnificently deranged results.

The Ushers now run a pharmaceutical empire built on a highly addictive painkiller. Tracking the family’s plunge into rot and ruin as its myriad moral crimes are laid bare, the series calls up several real-life business dynasties — fill in the blanks here as you will — while covering current issues such as the corporate connections to the opioid epidemic, to environmental devastation, to media disinformation.

Alongside these topical 21st-century trappings, however, there’s also a lot of Poevian mystery and imagination, with ravens and black cats, doomed women and doppelgangers, bloody footprints and tell-tale hearts, premature burials and plundered graves, and a general atmosphere of obsession, madness, miasma and melancholy.

As with Flanagan’s riffs on Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House) and Henry James (The Haunting of Bly Manor), this updated supernatural drama can be wonky, particularly in the opening episodes. But when Usher works, it really works, with a vibe that’s both completely nutty and absolutely sincere.

After a gothically awful childhood, siblings Roderick (Zach Gilford as a young man and then Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald/Mary McDonell) are… well, let’s say they’re close, possibly too close. We toggle between two time periods: In 1979, the siblings are struggling financially under the thumb of business mogul Rufus Griswold (named for Poe’s literary rival and posthumous defamer). In 2023, the Ushers, now including six of Roderick’s adult children, are phenomenally rich, powerful and privileged, but the justice department is making a case against the family business, led by the dogged Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) — a reference to a Poe character who is often considered the first literary detective.

After Dupin claims to have inside information, Roderick decides the informant must be one of his kids. And then the Ushers begin dying, one by one, in insanely baroque and bloody ways.

Oldest son Frederick (Henry Thomas), described as “a Roderick Usher tribute band,” runs the regular business and is desperate for his father’s love. The tightly wound Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) is trying to launch a GOOP-ish wellness brand and regards her fitness himbo husband as just another corporate asset.

There’s Victorine (T’Nia Miller), a researcher whose fraudulent medical study is moving toward reckless human trials; Camille (Kae Siegel), a PR flack who specializes in crisis management (handy!); Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) ), a Fyre Festival hipster nitwit; and Leo (Rahul Kohli), a video-game designer with addiction issues (he likes to get high on a street-drug modification of his family’s bestselling product).

Finally, there’s Arthur Gordon Pym, the family fixer who knows where the bodies are buried — literally — played by a growling Mark Hamill as a wildly sinister figure. (Mr. Pym wears black leather gloves even when indoors.)

There isn’t much suspense in wondering who will die — death is everywhere in this world, the ultimate cure for the fever of life. The show’s perverse pleasure comes in figuring out what kind of complicated Final Destination-style demise each person will meet. And all the deaths are connected to an enigmatic woman from Roderick and Madeline’s past, played with delicious panache by Flanagan regular Carla Gugino.

Flanagan specializes in families defined by trauma and guilt, but he never quite manages to connect to real emotion here, maybe because the Ushers are all so out-and-out awful. And some things simply don’t work: the characters’ corporate tough talk comes off as a weak imitation of Succession, and Flanagan’s sense of sin is slightly dorky, so the various vices and often filthy dialogue never quite convince (except, perhaps, with Tamerlane, who has a wonderfully specific kink).

Despite these wobbles, the series remains weird and watchable. The Fall of the House of Usher feels like minor Flanagan, but even minor Flanagan is a spooky-season treat.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca