“The Fall of the House of Usher,” Mike Flanagan’s highly anticipated horror series on Netflix, releases this Thursday, October 12. We saw it, here is our critical opinion.
The Halloween season is in full swing on Netflix, as we can see with the release of many horror programs online. The most anticipated is probably “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the latest series from Mike Flanagan (“The Haunting of Hill House”, “Bly Manor”, “Midnight Sermons”, “Midnight Club”) put online this Thursday 12 October, before he joined Prime Video.
In this homage to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, we follow a rich and powerful family at the head of a pharmaceutical empire in the worst week of its existence: every day (or almost), one of the six children of patriarch, Roderick Usher, dies in circumstances as disturbing as they are bloody.
It is possible to take a certain pleasure in this rather mysterious and entertaining massacre game, since Mike Flanagan knows how to perfectly keep his audience in suspense. Which makes the end of the viewing all the more disappointing. Because unfortunately, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is, to date, Mike Flanagan’s worst series.
The creator of the series decided to strike a blow to denounce capitalism and the powerful families at the origin of the opioid crisis in the United States. The Usher family thus holds up a thinly veiled mirror to the Sacklers, a family of American billionaires at the head of pharmaceutical laboratories considered responsible for more than 50,000 deaths since the end of the 1990s.
Mike Flanagan is visibly very angry, since the scandal denounced is written with a lot of crudeness and very little subtlety. Each episode is repetitive and follows the same pattern: a family member as unbearable as the rest of his siblings ends up dying in bloody circumstances in the last minutes, without it arousing any emotion.
And that’s the whole problem with “The Fall of the House of Usher”: we never identify with the characters, we never worry about their fate. Worse still for a horror series: it never scares.
The denouement, which takes far too long to arrive, is immediately disappointing, as is the final moral written with heavy clogs, as if Mike Flanagan himself was in a hurry to get rid of this myriad of unbearable characters. Like the spectator, ultimately.
