NETFLIX – ON DEMAND – MINISERIES
As is often the case with Mike Flanagan, it all starts by the fire. The rather cosey opening scene of The Fall of the House of Usher is like putting on your slippers after a hard day at work. Five years later, will the prolific American scriptwriter, a specialist in contemplative horror, finally reconnect with the terrifying melancholy of The Haunting of Hill House (2018)? Not quite, but something has changed in the software of the creator of Bly Manor (2020), Midnight Sermons (2021) and Midnight Club (2022).
In front of a fire, in what appears to be an abandoned old house, a man confesses to the prosecutor who has been trying to bring him down for decades. Haunted by wild hallucinations, Roderick Usher senses his end is nigh and wants to tell his side of the story. The illegitimate children of a secretary and her boss, Roderick and his twin sister, Madeline, took control of the laboratory run by their father and made millions thanks to a star drug, Ligodone, before being brutally overtaken by fate. In the space of a few weeks, Roderick's six children died in appalling circumstances. He knows why, and is about to tell C. Auguste Dupin the reasons behind his family's curse.
The Fall of the House of Usher is loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story of the same name (published in 1839), but the series' script reworks the story by turning the Ushers into a kind of mirror image of the Sackler family, owners of the American laboratory that markets OxyContin. Drawing on the opiate epidemic and health crisis that has plagued the United States for over 20 years, Mike Flanagan delivers a miniseries every bit as macabre as its predecessors, but with greater political ambition. While The Fall of the House of Usher doesn't have the documentary ambition of a "case file" series such as Dopesick (2021) or Painkiller (2023), it does, in its own way, fill in a blind spot by focusing on the roots of evil.
This probing story introduces many characters (played by regulars Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, T'Nia Miller... and the not-very-convincing addition of Mark Hamill as a mysterious henchman) and storylines: the story of Roderick and Madeline's miserable youth must be told, and the tragic end that awaits their descendants must be shown at great lengths and with bucket loads of blood.
With the first captivating episodes (the second, featuring a deadly rave party, is chilling), the series gives the impression of renewed inspiration, even if it is rather too quick to go back to the metaphysical small talk that its creator so loves.
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