Netflix Review: "The Fall of the House of Usher" (2023)

A new Netflix show has come from one of my favourite directors. The man behind The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and the brilliant Midnight Mass has come back and though his shows are not really true to the source material, because they are awesome, I don't consider it to be a fault. My personal favourite so far has been Midnight Mass and though it will stay in the top spot - there is something about The Fall of the House of Usher which offered it some competition. With the usual suspects as the stars including new members to the team, The Fall of the House of Usher is a perfect modern gothic television show to get people into the Halloween mood.

Complete with gore and gothics, this series makes its way through the deaths of various imagined members of the Usher family, a fictional representation for the machiavellian Sackler family of the opioid crisis. It covers how throughout a court case, the Usher family try to elicit sympathy through these deaths by exploiting them, but ultimately become caught in their own web of lies and their own delusions of grandeur when they realise that there is one weird woman who is targetting them all for unknown reasons.

Starting after the cases, you will initially find that characters often have names from other Edgar Allan Poe stories. Auguste Dupin in the present day talks to Roderick Usher, getting his final confession in his old family home where he once grew up. Beginning with the weirdness that infected his mother and her lack of want to take medication, he slowly watches her die and then, something else happens. As we go through flashbacks that are more than often abnormal filler and drawn out a bit too long, we find that Roderick Usher worked his way up from nothing. Again, these are very drawn out episodes that are not worth as much as they are shown over the story. For that, I will have to deduct one mark.

The court case shows us just how intentional this malevolent force is against the Usher family as one by one, the children begin to die in horrific ways. Immolation, falling to their deaths, mauled by a weird creature and much more - there are some very gruesome scenes in this show that are gothic as they are realistic. I like the idea of it and the mystery that is surrounding exactly why it happens this way is slowly revealed to us through a series of unfortunate events.

The acting was incredible and I like the fact that Mike Flanagan often uses the same actors to play very different roles. There is something familiar about the actors but very unfamiliar about the characters - it works for something like this. Mark Hamill was particularly good because I can't remember when I have ever seen him in a gothic horror role.

The atmosphere was great. Mike Flanagan mixes jump scares with atmospheric pressure as it builds around the illness that is inherited through the family (though I won't tell you where). As Mike Flanagan tries to root Roderick's hallucinations in reality, there is always an element of the supernatural watching over him and, you will only really discover why at the end.

Needless to say, Mike Flanagan is probably one of my favourite directors out there today. His shows always have a great storytelling quality to them and though the flashback scenes on to Roderick's early adulthood working in the pharmaceutical industry is drawn out and can get boring after a while, it does make sense to have it there. There are things that could have been cut out to intensify the horror scenes a bit but on the whole, the series makes for a brilliant piece of viewing in the Halloween season. From the actors, to the new characters they are playing, to the atmosphere to the storylines that interweave themselves in the plot - this is an excellent example of what Mike Flanagan does best - complex gothic horror.

That being said, I will have to still deduct one mark for the messiness that was interwoven. I understand why it's there, but it just makes the show a little boring from time to time.