Poe Money, Poe Problems

Fans of Mike Flanagan, the modern horror writer and director behind The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and Doctor Sleep, never have to wait long for his next project to drop. The man has released either a miniseries or a movie every year since 2016, a year that saw not one or two, but three of his movies hit screens. If you’re a writer, perhaps the only thing more annoying than Flanagan’s productivity rate is the fact that much of his work is good, sometimes even great, or at the very least a lot of fun. The Fall of the House of Usher, Flanagan’s latest miniseries now streaming on Netflix, is all of that and more. And if you happen to enjoy the works of Edgar Allan Poe, grab a glass of Amontillado and buckle up, because you’re in for a literary reference-fest the likes of which streaming TV has never seen.

“Usher” isn’t a simple retelling of the source material, a quintessentially melancholy Poe tale about a creepy house and a pair of creepy siblings and, naturally, someone accidentally buried alive. It’s a twenty-first century spin on seemingly Poe’s entire oeuvre, wrapped up in a morality tale about modern greed and the evils of pharmaceutical companies, 24 hour news channels, social media, celebrity worship and good old fashioned hedonism.

The series introduces us to the Usher family, a thinly veiled version of Purdue Pharma’s Sackler billionaire brood, most of whom, we learn in the opening minutes, have met their grisly demise in short order, leaving only company CEO and paterfamilias Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) and his ice queen sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell). Wracked by grief and guilt and all the other emotional trappings of a Poe villain, Usher invites his decades-long nemesis and once ally, US Attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), to the decrepit home of his youth in order to give a final confession. In doing so, the flashback framework of the story settles into place, and we get to see in piecemeal retrospect how each of Roderick’s vile children met their grisly fates.

Each episode of the series bears the title of a famous Poe work, and after we acquaint ourselves with Roderick and Madeline’s unfortunate childhood – which of course involves cruelty, illness, ghostly retribution, and a loved one buried while not quite dead – each one provides us with yet another death of a yet another awful Usher child. There’s Tamarlane (Samantha Sloyan), the wannabe lifestyle influencer, “Gucci Caligula” Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota), PR spin witch Camille (Kate Siegel), aspiring company scion Frederick (Henry Thomas), med tech upstart Victorine (T’Nia Miller), and gaming guru Napoleon (Rahul Kohli). I won’t get into spoiler territory here, but suffice it to say, every installment spins a dark yarn of just how rotten each Usher child turned out, and how each literally becomes the victim of their own ambition, cruelty, paranoia and madness. You know, like pretty much every stock character in any given Poe tale.

It’s a gory thrill anticipating how each of these characters is going to snuff it, and Flanagan doesn’t disappoint when it comes to the spectacularly icky end of each Usher, every single one of which should be shrewdly predicted by any first year English major, although doing so only adds to the fun here. This being a Poe-fest, there’s naturally a macabre masquerade ball that turns into a marvelously disgusting massacre (“The Masque of the Red Death”), someone winding up on the wrong end of an angry ape (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”), an evil feline (“The Black Cat”), disembowelment by a pendulum (“The Pit and the Pendulum,” duh), a tell-tale heart, a bottle of Amontillado and a brick wall, and so on. But is there a raven, you ask? Obviously! Not only does the famous bird appear symbolically as a harbinger of death throughout the series, it appears in character form as well, as a mysterious woman named Verna (Carla Gugino), which is an obvious anagram of “raven,” and who serves as Roderick’s Mephistopheles and the spectral tormentor-in-chief of each Usher sibling.

In describing it, you might feel that the series sounds a bit formulaic, and it largely is, but that’s by design and not necessarily a weakness. In less deft hands, such a miniseries would come off as clumsy or cheesy. But to his credit, Mike Flanagan knows how to write, and he definitely knows how to cast. The performances here are almost all top caliber, most of them coming from veterans of one or even most of the writer/director’s previous efforts. Bruce Greenwood, in particular, knocks his role into the cheap seats, and I’d be willing to wager a buffalo nickel that he’ll be nominated for an Emmy for his performance as Roderick. Take, for instance, this spiffy monologue about the old “lemons-into-lemonade” cliche. Flannagan’s script tees up Greenwood for a hole in one, and the result is undeniably satisfying to watch, maybe even moreso than yet another wretched Usher kid getting their lurid comeuppance.

The supporting ensemble all turn in admirable work, as well, from good hearted and hence doomed first wife Annabel Lee (Katie Parker), Frederick’s spouse Morella (Crystal Balint) and granddaughter Lenore (Kyliegh Curran), to Carl Lumbly’s adroit performance as the lawman and a gruff, nearly unrecognizable Mark Hammil as Usher family fixer Arthur Pym.

If you’re sensing that there are more than just a few Poe references and Easter Eggs scattered about here, buddy, you don’t know the half of it. The series is bursting at the seams with them, probably to its detriment. It feels like someone bet Mike Flanagan that he wasn’t able to name-drop every single Edgar Allan Poe character, story, poem or novel in a single miniseries, and Flannagan just said “hold my beer” and went to town on his laptop with a thousand Poe Wikipedia tabs left open on his browser. The need to shoehorn in references both obvious and obscure comes across as obsessive and more than a little annoying at times, resulting in things like a throwaway line about Lenore once referring to her grandfather Roderick as “Grampus,” a line that serves no other purpose than to name check the boat in Poe’s only published novel, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.”

At the end of the long, lugubrious night, though, an overabundance of literary nods isn’t enough to keep The Fall of the House of Usher from being a fun ride with some tremendous performances, memorable dialogue, stellar set and prop design, solid jump scares, and visuals that veer seamlessly from stylish to gloriously gruesome. And all of it comes to a narrative and visual crescendo that ultimately – and literally – brings the house down. For fans of spooky October television, you’d be hard pressed to find a new show that fits the bill better than this one. However, it is not the best adaptation of Poe’s work to grace the small screen.

That one goes to the Simpsons, and always will. Quoth the raven, “Eat my shorts!”