Mike Flanagan’s latest Netflix miniseries dishes out supernatural revenge on a pharmaceutical empire.
Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, the writer/director’s latest and final Netflix miniseries (the creator jumped ship for Amazon at the end of last year), is different from the others. In previous works of adaptation, like The Haunting of Hill House, or his original series Midnight Mass, Flanagan takes a deeply humane lens to horror, where ghosts and the supernatural are mirrors for his characters’ brokenness. Not so in The Fall of the House of Usher. Here, they are a reckoning. Roderick Usher’s children are dead. They had it coming.
Like in The Midnight Club and The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Fall of the House of Usher uses the story from which it takes its name (by Edgar Allan Poe, in this case) as a framing narrative to build the season around, with individual episodes turning to other Poe stories for inspiration. In Flanagan’s version, Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), the head of the Fortunato pharmaceutical company, sits in a ruined mansion that’s a reflection of his fortunes. His company is under investigation for pushing a highly addictive opioid on the market, his children are dead, and he’s got no one left to talk to but investigator C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly).
So he does: He tells his story of both his rise, as an ambitious mailroom worker at Fortunato (played by Zach Gilford), and his fall, recounting the string of misfortune that lead to his children dying one by one in a series of horrific and perhaps supernatural occurrences.
