‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Makes Gothic Horror of the Sackler Family

After the grim social survey of Dopesick and the kicky sensationalism of Painkiller, we may not need another television mini-series about the Sackler family and the opioid plague they unleashed upon the world. (There is also, of course, a raft of documentaries about that crisis, perhaps most notably last year’s exquisite All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.) But Netflix has found a way to tweak that sorry, infuriating narrative into something new. 

The streamer has gone to Mike Flanagan, the horror auteur behind The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor (among other projects), and tasked him with telling another sprawling, ornately gothic story about a family gone to ruin. Thus, The Fall of the House of Usher (premiering October 12)—an Edgar Allan Poe mega-mashup that chronicles the operatic downfall of a big pharma family, done in by a terrible curse of their own making. 

The series is not an exercise in subtlety. Flanagan is, as ever, enamored of a long and literate monologue, of a gnarly death sequence, of grand emotional brushstrokes. House of Usher is a heavy show, stuffed to the gills with morbid humor and gloomy pathos, political allusions jumbled together with myriad pop culture references. The series is, in its eight-episode run, sometimes an exhausting sit. Yet it’s engrossing throughout, shifting from the gothic to the baroque as miserable punishment befalls each Usher—one by bloody one. 

Bruce Greenwood plays Roderick Usher, patriarch of a family that has made billions pushing a potent and highly addictive painkiller. The company is called Fortunato, one of many Poe allusions that Flanagan has scattered throughout the series. One episode evokes “The Pit and the Pendulum,” another “The Raven,” another “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Carl Lumbly plays C. Auguste Dupin, a modern update of Poe’s recurring investigator character. These literary tie-ins are half clever, half overweening. Flanagan’s eagerness to link everything together into a tight, referential knot leads to some straining; intricacy gives way to the overwrought. 

Still, one has to admire the scope of this massive project. As he has done before, Flanagan sets things up with a framing device: Roderick, mourning the loss of his children, invites his dogged antagonizer Dupin (who is fighting on the side of good) to a creepy old house on a midnight dreary (which is, indeed, the title of the first episode) to finally confess to his many crimes and misdeeds. As Roderick tells his long story, we go zooming back in time, first to the nightmarish childhood shared by Roderick and his sister, Madeline (played in her 20s by Willa Fitzgerald, and as an older woman by Mary McDonnell), then onward toward the present, as Roderick (played as a younger man by Zach Gilford) builds his empire at a steep moral cost. 

Spanning decades and many characters, House of Usher doesn’t always manage its many threads well. We’re too often ripped back into the past, away from what is most interesting. Really, we just want to know how all of Roderick’s kids died—the why can come later. (When an explanation does arrive, after so many hours of ominous teasing, it proves a little underwhelming.) What Flanagan does most effectively is create an air of dreadful inevitability. There is a satisfying structure to the series, a rhythmic picking-off of characters as they suffer the karmic retribution of their father’s original sin. 

Many Flanaganverse company members play those kids. Henry Thomas is the eldest son, a feckless dolt whose daughter, Lenore (Kyleigh Curran), has somehow turned out decent. Samantha Sloyan is the GOOP-wannabe eldest daughter. T’Nia Miller is a medical equipment executive hiding a gruesome secret. Rahul Kohli is a self-involved bisexual video game designer; Kate Siegel is the family’s ruthless head of public relations; and Sauriyan Sapkota is the party boy baby of the family. 

They are all bad people, to slightly varying degrees. House of Usher attempts a certain knowingness about the family dynamics of the ultra rich that was, of course, a hallmark of Succession. But Flanagan is not exactly a comedian; his version of biting social satire is broader and less sharp than Jesse Armstrong’s take on Manhattan media monsters. Still, Flanagan has made his own warring scions appropriately loathsome. It’s wickedly entertaining to watch each of Roderick’s entitled brats meet macabre ends. (One death scene, in the second episode, is particularly nasty.)