Edgar Allan Poe scholars have a new series to devote their attention to: The Fall of the House of Usher created by Mike Flanagan, one of the most thought-provoking voices in recent horror. It is a free adaptation of the gothic writer’s short story as he had also done on Netflix with The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, which he baptized in its television version as The Haunting of Bly Manor.
Readers may find more differences than similarities with the reference material, but Flanagan understands his work as an homage to Poe’s complete works. Characters named Arthur Pym or Annabel Lee, for example, demonstrate this: they borrow their names from the writer’s only novel and last poem respectively. But, beyond this knowledge and understanding of the Gothic writer, the adaptation reveals an uncomfortable truth: that we are faced with a screenwriter in low hours, inconsequential, who amplifies the hallmarks of his identity as an author to the point of parody.
All six of Roderick Usher’s (Bruce Greenwood) children have died. They have done it one after the other in recent days, in circumstances that have nothing to do with each other and that rule out murder. It is in these circumstances that the patriarch, owner of a pharmaceutical company without any kind of sense of ethics or social responsibility, summons the detective who has been investigating him his entire career but who has never been able to put him in prison. He wants to offer her a confession, tell her his story, in his abandoned childhood home. It is in this context that he begins a story that goes back to his youth and that also allows us to meet the six Usher children, all of them close to sociopathy because they are surrounded by absolute privilege, whom the viewer will be able to see die one by one. one.
It is interesting to see how Flanagan once again transforms his sense of horror, always subject to the particularities of history and often to other genres. After an extremely dramatic vision in Hill House, romantic in Bly Manor or deconstructing vampirism in Midnight Mass as if it were a treatise on faith, in Usher it acquires a satirical tone to denounce the inhumanity of the Sackler family, responsible for the crisis. of opioids in the United States. However, by letting himself be carried away by portraits that are as comical as they are heartless, he builds almost interchangeable characters, clichés with legs, who sniff even the dust in the corners and who are bisexual to represent his depravity and hunger for pleasure (yes, the eternal prejudice biphobic). The actors, by the way, are all already regulars in his audiovisual world: Zach Gilford, Carla Cugino, T’Nia Miller, Rahul Kohli, Henry Thomas, Michael Trucco or his wife Kate Siegel.
The terror here is more inserted as a joke than as a tool to create a sickening atmosphere or provoke fear in the viewer. It allows you to build a funny scene like the first death or a scene that is as gory as it is disturbing. Much more present, for example, are the trademark soliloquies where the characters release reflections on power and privilege. But here, instead of penetrating the viewer, they sound ridiculous because of the stereotypes of the characters, the inconsequential nature of the story, the frivolity with which the current opioid crisis in the United States and the role of the Sacklers in it are addressed. after fantastic x-rays like the Dopesick series and the journalistic book The Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe.
The episodic structure with one death per episode, the production values ??and the sympathy that can be felt for its usual actors allow The Fall of the House of Usher to be seen, but this time Flanagan’s identity translates into repellent.
