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The Fall of the House of Usher Review

The Fall of the House of Usher is a gothic horror miniseries created by Mike Flanagan that premiered on Netflix in 2023. It’s a silly, but wildly entertaining show.

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“What is a poem, after all, if not a safe space for a difficult truth“

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Siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built a pharmaceutical company into an empire of wealth, privilege and power; however, secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty start dying. Unlike ‘Midnight Mass’, this series is Mike Flanagan at his most entertaining instead of thought-provoking. The tone is slightly comedic instead of dramatic while the overall atmosphere is Gothic with a tinge of melodrama. It also has a toxic family full of horrible people in the vein of ‘Succession’, a clear influence on the show.

It is obvious that Flanagan is an Edgar Allan Poe fan as his love for the author emits from the screen throughout this series. He honored the author not just through the titles of the episodes, but also in content with a lot of symbolism and character names from his tales incorporated here. The highlights were the deaths. Every single death corresponds to the death in the titular story that the episode loosely adapts, but Flanagan takes them to the extreme, modernizing them in the process. For example, the last and most impressive death sequence is a nod to ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, but one with a much more brutal outcome.

Speaking of deaths, they are a double-edged sword. While I loved the audacity and originality of those scenes, I also found them obviously predictable. The show is structured in such a way that each of the six children get their own episode where they will be developed more until eventually getting killed in one gruesome way or another. Needless to say, this structure, although at first interesting and unique, left no room for surprises or twists.

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My main issue, however, lies in the finale. This episode capped things off in such a haphazard, rather boring way. I’d expected some sort of underlying twist to the whole proceedings or more exploration of its main villain of sorts, but we did not get any of that. It just ended with a whimper. Carla Vugino’s Verna is this mysterious woman that stands for death itself probably, but although she was initially so cool and fascinating, eventually she ended up being underutilized and underdeveloped.

I also did not like what they did to Madeline Usher. Her death seemed rather implausible and frustrating. Other than that conclusion, Mary McDonnell was incredible in the role and I found her among the standouts. Bruce Greenwood isn’t sinister enough in the role of the family’s patriarch, but he was still quite good and I also really liked their shared history together. The sibling dynamic on this show is terrific.

Naturally, all of the Usher descendants are horrendous. Every single one of them was such a terrible human being that I was not too sad to see them die. Frederick was the worst of the bunch and genuinely psychopathic, Leo is quite memorable albeit his death was the silliest one, Tamerlane is also atrocious and easy to root against, and Victorine was despicable especially for what she did to her girlfriend.

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Perry was killed too soon and that also applies to Camille, who was among the most entertaining characters on the show. Kate Siegel was surprisingly good in this role and it’s a shame that they killed her off so early on. There is a lot of emphasis on the sexually alternative lifestyles of these characters that was typical of Netflix, but not too annoying in this instance. The series moved with a brisk pace and it was so well shot that I enjoyed it throughout.