What Critics And Fans Are Saying About The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Table Of Content

• Spoilers.
• Mike Leigh to Receive Inaugural Career Honor From Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival
• 'Loki' Season 2 Episode 4 Review
• Tiffany & Co. Repaints Historic Hearst Estate to Launch Its Blue Book Celeste Jewelry Collection
• Series & Book Cover.
• Candace Parker, WNBA Champion And Olympic Gold Medalist, Announces Retirement

There’s nothing of Poe’s lingering mysteries, the giant unresolved questions of internal motivations and dreamlike logic that hang over his stories and their subjects. In November 2023, Roderick Usher, the CEO of pharmaceutical company Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, loses all six of his children within two weeks. Auguste Dupin, an Assistant United States Attorney who dedicated his career to exposing Fortunato's corruption, to his childhood home, where he tells the true story of his family and unveils the Ushers' darkest secrets. I trust you see what Flanagan, who wrote or co-wrote nearly every episode and directed much of the series, is doing there?

Spoilers.

Loosely based on various works by 19th-century author Edgar Allan Poe (most prominently the eponymous 1840 short story), the series adapts otherwise unrelated stories and characters by Poe into a single nonlinear narrative set from 1953 to 2023. It recounts both the rise to power of Roderick Usher, the powerful CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company and his sister Madeline Usher, the firm's genius COO, and the events leading to the deaths of all six of Roderick’s children. It stars an ensemble cast led by Carla Gugino as a mysterious woman plaguing the Ushers, Bruce Greenwood as an elderly Roderick and Mary McDonnell as an elderly Madeline. “The Fall of the House of Usher” updates the work of Edgar Allan Poe for the era of Big Pharma, turning his most famous tales into a sprawling story of the decline of a wealthy American family. It’s “Succession” meets The Tell-Tale Heart, a story of vengeance, power, betrayal, and bloody parts. The eight-episode mini-series reimagines eight of Edgar Allen Poe’s most recognizable tales and features countless references to some of his other works.

Mike Leigh to Receive Inaugural Career Honor From Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival

When the young and trendy Prospero Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota) decides to host an exclusive sex-and-drugs party at one of dad’s old factories in an abbey, readers of The Masque of the Red Death will know it’s going to be a gruesome scene. However, Flanagan is smart enough to shift the Poe narratives ever so slightly for a modern audience. His version of The Tell-Tale Heart is a modern gem, and “The Gold-Bug” is reimagined as a new brand for the Usher company.

'Loki' Season 2 Episode 4 Review

Classic tales marry with modern commentary in a limited series that delivers at every turn. You’ll scream, you’ll cry, and once it’s over you might just start it all over from the beginning again. The Haunting of Hill House set the bar for scares in Flanagan’s filmography, and The Fall of the Usher meets those expectations with ease thanks to the work of cinematographer Michael Fimognari (Flanagan and Fimognari have enjoyed a long partnership, dating back to 2013’s Oculus). Like Hill House before it, House of Usher features a good blend of slow, spooky scares and outright shrieks as Roderick recounts his complicated tale to Auguste in the musty carcass of his childhood home. Both the past and present timelines are filled with the kind of horrors you’ve come to expect from Flanagan, but he really flexes in the methodology of murder as tragedy barrels its way through the Usher family. What’s more, the underlying reason for these deaths — the reason we spend eight episodes watching Usher and his family be stalked by Gugino’s Lady Death — turns out to be essentially Faustian, with everything spelled out and conveniently moralistic.

The Fall of the House of Usher - 1x01 "A Midnight Dreary" - Episode Discussion

Each captures the chaotic conflict of a tortured violent psyche, and each works because the show takes the time to establish their characters and then lets us see their gradual mental collapse and demise. The first win belongs to T’Nia Miller as Victorine, the heart research scientist whose pursuit of a miracle medical technology drives her into complete psychosis. When it does, the result is a wondrously bloody, pitch-perfect display of the macabre.

Most of the flashbacks to a young Usher and Dupin are thin, especially compared to the wicked fun on display in the fates of the Usher children. It feels like padding to get episodes to a full hour when Flanagan and company could have leaned even more into the episodic structure that highlights a single Poe per chapter. However, it's an incredibly easy show to enjoy on an episode-by-episode basis, largely because Flanagan’s direction is sharp throughout, including excellent use of music and tight editing—some scenes are too underlit, but that’s just the Netflix brand nowadays, and I’m done fighting it. English majors will likely know where some of the stories are going just by seeing the episode names.

Series & Book Cover.

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Samatha Sloyan’s Tamerlane Usher is one of Roderick’s children, who starts a health and wellness company of her own in an attempt to step out of her father’s shadow. Despite being the natural heir to the company, he’s described as the least capable person to take over the business out of all his siblings. Carla Gugino’s Verna is a shape-shifting demon, who made a deal with twins Roderick and Madeline when they were younger. Decades later, she returns at the height of Fortunato’s power to massacre the heirs to the Usher fortune. And this The Fall of the House of Usher trailer shows us exactly why.

Candace Parker, WNBA Champion And Olympic Gold Medalist, Announces Retirement

The mini-series is an absolute masterpiece and one that should be on everyone’s watchlist. It features some familiar faces in the Flanagan universe such as Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas, and Kate Siegel, and we saw a few new faces that I hope we will see in future Flanagan projects. The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 collection of stories by Ray Bradbury, contains a novella called "Usher II," a homage to Poe. Its main character, William Stendahl, builds a house based on the specifications from Poe's story to murder his enemies. A second silent film version, also released in 1928, was directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber.

Many of the celestial-themed jewels were conceived by famed designer Jean Schlumberger, whose tenure with Tiffany & Co. began in 1956 and lasted until his death in 1987. His talent was so prolific, the high-jewelry workshops in the jeweler’s Fifth Avenue Landmark building continue to produce new pieces based on his archived sketches, many featuring signature elements that range from nature motifs to artful settings that mix yellow gold and platinum. In 1979, Italian state channel RAI loosely adapted the short story, together with other Poe's works, in the series I racconti fantastici di Edgar Allan Poe.[33] It was directed by Daniele D'Anza, with Roderick Usher played by Philippe Leroy; music was composed by pop band Pooh. Of course, that tragedy is more for the patriarch than it is for us, and their deaths, while instrumental to the story, aren’t really what it’s about. Though their respective demises come in varying degrees and patterns of awful, almost every member of the House of Usher is despicable in their own way.

To secure their fortune — and future — two ruthless siblings build a family dynasty that begins to crumble when their heirs mysteriously die, one by one. While in 2023 Tiffany & Co. plumbed the depths of the seas for its Blue Book inspirations, for 2024, the jewelry house looked to the heavens to create Tiffany Céleste, a collection that interprets the sun, moon, stars and the galaxies beyond in diamonds, gold, platinum and gemstones. Inside the house, which was also staged with furniture, three rooms were transformed into on-site jewelry showrooms, all of which showcased the new Céleste collection. The 157 pieces are offered at an average price of “close to a million if not above,” as Nathalie Verdeille, Tiffany & Co. chief artistic director of jewelry and high jewelry, shared with WWD. Sliding through it all is the mysterious man who works as a sort of fixer for the Ushers, Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), totally reimagined from the title character in Poe’s only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. A television adaptation was produced by ATV for the ITV network in 1966 for the horror anthology series Mystery and Imagination.

As he relates the shield falling from off the wall, a hollow metallic reverberation can be heard throughout the house. At first, the narrator ignores the noises, but Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical. Roderick eventually declares that he has been hearing these sounds for days, and that they are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed. There’s not a moment where The Fall of the House of Usher doesn’t shine, whether it’s in the gloss of Louboutins or the pools of blood. From Susan Davis’ costume department to the extensive visual effects team, each crew came together to deliver their absolute A-game. The new entry into the Mike Flanagan pantheon is always firing on all cylinders, and it’s sure to join many a fan’s annual rotation of spooky time traditions.

His mental health deteriorates faster as he begins to hear Madeline's attempts to escape the underground vault she was buried in, and he eventually meets his death out of fear in a manner similar to the House of Usher's cracking and sinking. Roderick and Madeline are twins and the two share an incommunicable connection that critics conclude may be either incestuous or metaphysical,[7] as two individuals in an extra-sensory relationship embodying a single entity. To that end, Roderick's deteriorating condition speeds his own torment and eventual death. During one sleepless night, the narrator reads aloud to Usher as eerie sounds are heard throughout the mansion. He witnesses Madeline's reemergence and the subsequent, simultaneous death of the twins. The narrator is the only character to escape the House of Usher, which he views as it cracks and sinks into the mountain lake.

But that anger frequently gets in the way of the thematic richness that gave The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass their mournful charge. For eight hours, instead of rooting for people, you’re rooting for payback, leading to a satisfying, but surface-level experience. The horror auteur uses his familiar acting troupe and the works of Edgar Allan Poe as the backdrop for an eight-episode takedown of an opioid-pushing family that somewhat resembles the Sacklers.

Not just out of the will, as Madeline (Mary McDonnell) explains, they’re dead. Is that a terrific or horrific time we’re alluding to in the headline? Netflix’s latest (and final) limited series from creator Mike Flanagan promises yet another exquisite turn that lands somewhere between art-piece and terror. But it certainly looks like The Fall of the House of Usher will leave us with a bang. The Fall of the House of Usher trailer starts off strong and then only gets wilder. Check out character descriptions and our first good look at Mike Flanagan’s Poe-inspired series below.

Costumes and hair, incidentally, are a huge part of the characterizations in this show, from Greenwood’s mustache to Thomas’ disturbing man-bun. Production design, oddly, is less central, and this is the first of the Flanagan shows not to be a tour de force in that department. The show generally doesn’t look cheap and there are evocative images aplenty, but despite “house” being right there in the title, the domestic locations, however ostensibly opulent, are never memorable. Sauriyan Sapkota’s Perry Usher is the youngest of the Usher children. Rather than inventing new medical tools or running the family empire, he wants to make life one big party.