Fall of the House of Usher’s Verna lets its villains off the hook

Mike Flanagan didn’t start his storytelling career on Netflix, but it is where he found his voice. Beginning with The Haunting of Hill HouseFlanagan created, wrote, and directed series that were increasingly complicated and personal for the streaming services. Every show is different. The Haunting of Bly-ManorYou can also find out more about the following: Midnight Mass, is an exploration of an ensemble cast’s dark shadows through ghoulish jump scares and an endless string of monologues.

Flanagan’s characters have always been excellent at exploring existential questions of death and faith. The fall of the House of UsherIt is the first time he has attempted to transcend his own darkness in order to tackle bigger social problems. It is his biggest, most ambitious show; it’s often even his most impressive. But it’s also far and away his worst.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for The Fall of the House of Usher.]

Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

A loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story. The fall of the House of UsherThe Ushers, and in particular the two siblings who are at its head, Roderick and Madeline, as they watch their pharmaceutical and family empire fall apart around them. Before their recent fall from the top, a scandal-filled week that also saw each of the family’s six heirs die tragically, the Ushers were one of the richest and most powerful families in the world, but also one of the most hated.

Flanagan’s style is to tell the story through frame narratives: an aged Roderick Usher who takes us through the rise and the fall of his life, while a Usher descendant dies on average every episode.

If there’s one thing that Flanagan has proven in his previous four shows and two movies at Netflix (and his Doctor Sleep movie, which came in the middle of all of that), it’s that he’s a tremendously gifted craftsman and technician. Each of the Usher kids’ stories are told precisely and effectively, sowing seeds of their poetic demise early in the episode before paying them off in the end before a smash cut to the title card and credits.

Flanagan is a tremendous adapter of horror stories, but what he’s even better at is a sort of bibliographic quilting — combining pieces, elements, stories, and ideas from several works of an author and assembling them together into a beautiful pastiche. This is exactly what he did when he married Stephen King’s version of The Shining with Stanley Kubrick’s movie in Doctor SleepHe was very sly in what he did. The Haunting of Hill HouseOther Shirley Jackson references were woven into the tale. But none of those were half so ambitious as weaving nearly every one of Poe’s short stories, poems, and other writings into one series. The deaths are all references to different Poe stories, his characters and ideas. Usher’s plot and world.

Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

Unfortunately, Flanagan’s series buckles under the weight of its own references, and by the end it snaps open, revealing itself to be completely hollow and thematically and emotionally empty.

For as well done as most of the individual episodes are, and as carefully plotted as each Usher kid’s demise ends up, the stories themselves wind up feeling emotionally vacant and add up to nothing. When Leo falls off his balcony chasing an invisible cat, we don’t get a better sense of the character, or the world, or what the show is really about — just one more gruesome death. It’s one thing to make a rich asshole that feels vaguely, begrudgingly fun to root for; it’s another to create characters whose whole purpose is for us to cheer at their horrible death. They are never much more than an image in their show. The children don’t each come to represent some failing of their father or his evil empire; they’re just here to die. Flanagan doesn’t manage to make these characters feel anything other than avatars of a new type of suffering, and esoteric Poe references.

The theme of this half-baked presentation is everywhere. House of Usher, but the series’ dealings with the supernatural and the opioid epidemic are what actively hurt it most.

The Ushers made their fortune with an opioid drug called Ligadone, a tremendously strong “nonaddictive’’ painkiller that turned out to be hyper addictive, even if the regulators didn’t see it that way. The drug is Flanagan’s way into the opioid crisis, and his way into Usher’s only semi-coherent thematic goal: showing us that the opioid epidemic is a massive human tragedy built purely on greed.

What is the real plot twist? House of Usher rests on frequent Flanagan player Carla Gugino, who plays the show’s only real supernatural entity: a character named Verna, a mysterious supernatural entity with a seeming interest in suffering and power. In the ’70s, she makes a deal with Roderick and Madeline that their dream of fabulous wealth in pharmaceuticals will come true, free from the frustrating roadblocks of litigation or consequence. After their success for years, they die out along with their bloodline.

Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

It’s a deal with the devil, a classic setup, and a strong enough act of hubris to stand entirely on its own. Flanagan, however, refuses to allow his show to be less than comprehensive and comment upon anything other than the entire 20th century. In doing so, Flanagan goes (way too) big. Flanagan shows us photos of Verna palling around with people she seems to have made similar deals with, though it’s never clear what her motivations are. Prescott Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush), the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, William Randolph Hearst, and John Francis Queeny — the latter of whom Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), the Usher family attorney, points out is the founder of Monsanto, in case things were too subtle for you so far.

There’s even a photo of Donald Trump, though Flanagan can’t resist drawing an extra line under him, later having Verna say that she “told another client of hers he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it” as a display of her power. It’s profoundly embarrassing, but also a good display of the level of nuance that Flanagan seems to be capable of working with on these issues.

Verna confronts Roderick near the end of show and displays a scene of New York’s skyline, with bodies from his victims falling. She gleefully recounts opioid statistics at him (and the audience) didactically, then she seems impressed when she informs Roderick that he’s in her top five all-time killers. Since we know she’s dealt with some of the 20th century’s most powerful people, we’re supposed to understand just how bad opioids are, but because we don’t know much about her or her clients, this all just comes out kind of muddy.

It’s the kind of scene that scans just fine on paper, and even initially may read as powerful. It’s utterly cowardly and crumbles completely when you look at it for even one second. We’re shown that the price of Roderick and Madeline’s greed is genocide, but by crediting the success of their empire to some supernatural force, Flanagan is letting his real monsters off the hook.

Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

In Roderick’s case it removes the agency that made him interesting. He is no longer an enthusiastic self-believer who will blind himself to total ignorance. Instead, he has become a cog of a cosmic puzzle that ended as soon as the contract was signed. Roderick is interesting when he’s the version of the character we see early on: a man in total and absolute denial that his drug could cause anyone problems. The fact that he insists that Ligadone addiction is the result of moral failure on behalf of the users could have been the basis for a great character. But the show abandons this in the hope of tying all of the problems of the 20th Century together.

Usher Flanagan fails most when he attempts to infuse any of these with a bigger meaning. Flanagan is in his bag when he’s in the realm of supernatural forces working in people’s lives, subtly moving the existential lines in the brains of one or two people and how that radiates out to the people they love — like in his best work, Midnight Mass. The showy nature of his dialogue is undermined by his over-simplifications and generalizations when he tries to address tangible real world issues. Placing a fictional opioid magnate alongside, presumably but not explicitly, some of the great powers of the 20th century trivializes real loss, and turns actual genocide into blurry hyperbole all for the sake of dramatic effect in a show that absolutely doesn’t earn that kind of loftiness.

This is where the limits of Flanagan’s Poe pastiche really show themselves. By taking all of Poe’s work and smelting it into one narrative alloy while grafting the opioid crisis on top of it, he’s created something wholly new, but also something soft and brittle that can’t bend an inch without snapping. House of Usher’s theme only goes as deep as Flanagan’s surface-level references because it’s so completely his own creation.

Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

What does this mean for you? Usher Flanagan nail the setup with an excellent pilot and some good follow-ups. It’s when he starts trying to connect any of these parts that the whole thing gets away from him. Each episode’s singular narrative is fine enough, and the series is always watchable, but the collective whole of the story amounts to very little and falls frustratingly short of the goals it sets for itself. It would have made for a great bit of devious entertainment if the show had let the thematic focus of the opioid epidemic take the backseat to the story of these wealthy, evil monsters. Flanagan, however, ends her show by focusing solely on how the wealthy monsters are a threat to the society and not their small misdeeds.

As a series, it is, at best, a dull shadow of other, better works by Flanagan or others, but at worst, offensive. Flanagan’s decision to use the reality of the opioid crisis to frame the series only serves to highlight how bad and boring his creation really is. The real-world opioid companies are evil, and do irreparable harm that’s nearly impossible to comprehend. But that harm isn’t supernatural; it’s regular, boring, and greedy. Flanagan is desperately trying to make his story relate to real problems. Instead, it uses a ghost story shoddy that ignores the problems and punishes those responsible for real evil. Usher’s lamentable fake family.