Take the recent pharma-scandal series “Dopesick” and “Painkiller,” mix in an equal amount of “Succession” and stir it all up in a giant vat of Edgar Allan Poe, and you’ve got the gory and bloody and wickedly funny Netflix horror soap opera “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
Dread master Mike Flanagan (“The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” “Midnight Mass”) has created a series that goes over the top at times and stops the momentum dead in its tracks on a handful of occasions with preachy social/political monologues — but this also is a great-looking slice of horror entertainment with brilliant performances from an extended ensemble that includes a number of Flanagan regulars, including Henry Thomas, T’Nia Miller, Rahul Kohli, Samantha Sloyan and Kate Siegel.
As for that title: While “The Fall of the House of Usher” is indeed built on the foundation of the 1839 short story of the same name, Flanagan’s reliance on the Poe catalog extends far beyond that, as he weaves in storylines based on “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Mask of the Red Death” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” among others. The references to Poe continue through the names of various characters and numerous visual cues — but even if read just a little Poe in your school days and returned to his works nevermore, “The Fall of the House of Usher” still provides a visceral charge as a stand-alone work.
Meet the Ushers, an obscenely wealthy, ruthlessly ambitious, cruelly calculating and wildly dysfunctional family that will remind you of the real-life Sackler pharmaceutical dynasty and the Roy clan from “Succession.” The series begins with the dominating patriarch Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) inviting his longtime nemesis, the investigator turned prosecutor Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) to Roderick’s crumbling and rotted childhood home, where Roderick says he’s responsible for the violent and horrific recent deaths of all six of his grown children, and he’s ready to confess.
Cue the flashbacks. We learn that over the years, while Roderick and his equally cunning and icy sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell) have built a multi-billion-dollar painkiller company that has hooked millions of patients and resulted in untold thousands of deaths, Roderick has fathered six children from five different mothers. They’re all desperate to please daddy with their business acumen, and they’re all thoroughly irredeemable and corrupt. Frederick (Henry Thomas), the eldest son and heir apparent, and Tamerlane (Samatha Sloyan), who is launching a GOOP-like wellness brand, are Roderick’s children from his first wife, who left Roderick when she saw the monster he was becoming. (In flashback sequences, Zach Gilford is the young Roderick and Willa Fitzgerald is the young Madeline, with Katie Parker as Roderick’s wife, Annabel Lee, as in, “But we loved with a love that was more than love, I and my Annabel Lee …”)
The other four children, all from different mothers, are collectively and derisively known as “The Bastards.” Camille (Kate Siegel) is a sardonic media handler who is constantly putting out fires set by the Roderick clan; Napoleon (Rahul Kohli) is a drug-addicted video game developer; Victorine (T’Nia Miller) is a surgeon who is illegally experimenting on chimps while trying to develop a revolutionary heart device, and Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota), the youngest, is planning a series of pop-up orgies and will bend and break any ordinances and laws necessary to earn his nickname of “Gucci Caligula.” (That’s some ambition there, kid.) Other key characters include the family attorney and consigliere Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), a mysterious woman named Verna (Carla Gugino) who keeps popping into the Ushers’ lives, and Roderick’s granddaughter, Lenore (Kyliegh Curran), who might be the only true and decent soul in the whole bunch. Performances throughout are uniformly excellent.
At times “The House of Usher” overdoes it with the admittedly effective jump scares, as Roderick is plagued by visions of his dead children, all of whom died in explicitly gruesome fashion. (You won’t want to be spooling spaghetti or eating forkfuls of rigatoni while watching any of these episodes.) Still, there are numerous scenes that elicit instant goosebumps; we know these horrible and sometimes fatuous people are doomed, and we know their utterly terrible father, who actually refers to himself as “Dr. Frankenstein” at one point in a prideful manner, is somehow responsible for their deaths. The thing is, by the time each of them meets their maker, we’ve seen that they pretty much deserve it.
