Review: The Fall of the House of Usher (Patreon)

Sometimes life and art sit down together for an intense meeting that quickly devolves into a tense, long-awaited hate fuck. They will agree on exactly one matter, which they will force onto the world stage, drawing out the most agonizing, subconscious fears of the public. They will force the public to look them in the eye like a raven peering trenchantly at a pharma tycoon lying prostrate on a sidewalk. They will sink their fangs into the flesh of their audience like a ravenous demon, starving for blood.

The Fall of the House of Usher is mostly the vicious, carnal tableau you’d hope it would be but wouldn’t expect Mike Flanagan to make. The cloying moments that Flanagan’s detractors usually hate are sparse compared to The Haunting of Hill House or even the shockingly bleak Midnight Mass. There’s a chance that even Edgar Allan Poe would cringe at the giallo-esque moments of brutal, gory contrapasso that end each episode. If you like cruel gothic horror, this is pretty delicious.

It’s still a Mike Flanagan show produced for Netflix, of course, for better or for worse (I’m a fan, so I’ll say for the better). The Fall of the House of Usher exhibits a slow creep in quality typical of streaming shows. The first episode is wonky, awkwardly shoving a scary Poe fable into a box with a Succession-esque political dynasty drama about the covert social evils of big pharma. It’s not until about halfway through the show that these approaches start to gel, not least because Flanagan, for all his strengths, is hardly an astute observer of politics. Skyscrapers aren’t actually particularly effective stand-ins for gothic towers, and “the rich are monsters” is not in itself a trenchant analysis of capitalism.

But somewhere around the halfway mark, this starts to work. It becomes clear that House of Usher is a Faustian tragedy by way of gothic horror/conspiracy thriller via a post-Sopranos family drama. The Sacklers as a gothic dynasty begins to click after a few episodes without any concrete evidence of the Usher family’s impact on the world at large. Wealth is insulating — possessing unnatural quantities of property warps a person’s psychology. And it’s the original sin at the heart of the Ushers’ tragedy — Roderick Usher’s terminal reticence that damns his children before they’re even born.

And this is a truly staggering feat with such brief source material. “The Fall of the House of Usher” was my shit in seventh grade, but I was curious how Flanagan, even after successfully making a TV show out of The Turn of the Screw, would transform Poe into a miniseries. Remarkably, he pulls the most story out of the least amount of source material. Instead of being trapped by his source material, Flanagan is liberated by the gaps in it.

The whole thing comes together deliciously. It’s a Moffatian puzzle box, of course, but an exquisitely assembled one with a conscience and a goal. House of Usher spits venom at the rich, explicitly naming Prescott Bush and David Koch in its account of the evils of the capitalist epoch. It’s glorious, even at its messiest; no television since Mr. Robot has had this much contempt for the rich. And we have delights like Rahul Kohli being the worst gay streaming shitbag on the planet, Mark Hamill at his best, and a gay Black C. Auguste Dupin (how long until Flanagan adapts Conan Doyle?). I had great fun with The Fall of the House of Usher, and you know that means it must be pretty fucked up.